Stars, Hide Your Fires
by AristideCauquemaire
Summary: Draco Malfoy is becoming scared of waking up in the morning. Exhausted, he hardly even notices as his waking hours slowly become one lasting nightmare - from which only one person can rouse him. Drama, angst, grown-up language & themes; original characters, time leaps. Post-Hogwarts. Slash, DM/HP. Complete!
1. Prologue

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama.

/

_Happy Holidays, everyone!_

_This is the third fanfiction I ever shared with all y'all, and I'm still as excited as if it were the very first._

_First and foremost: Mighty thanks to my dearest beta-reader Nia! Your comments are like warm honey. I *love* warm honey. Nia also baptized this story for me and helped with the summary. Hugs & kisses, my love.  
_

_To all the readers who have read my stuff before: Welcome back! To all those who have fav'ed and followed my other stories (or even... me) in the meantime - Ashteldar's Jewel, Luzydeath, nightworldangel, Madoma, Jeane-Granger, oakdraconis, loewchen, MagpieShadow, scadooden (Did I forget anyone?) – THANK YOU!_  
_Everyone: You should know that comments make me happy as a puppy. If you log in for your comment, I will also respond personally. If you don't, I will respond with the posting of the next chapter._

**About this story:  
**_**This story contains slash, meaning love between two men. If you do not like to read about this, don't read it.**_

**_It is also a pretty long story. It'll probably have around 20 chapters when it's done._**

_This story is complete on my computer and thus not *really*__ in progress any more, but as I did with "Thoughts", I will post one new chapter every evening.  
For now, have the prologue and the first chapter. Enjoy. _

/

**-/Prologue/-**

/

He is tapping the heel of his foot against the leg of his chair. Rapidly and repeatedly. That, and the frequency with which he is checking his watch and looking around him, and maybe the unnecessary straightening of hair and cuff links and the rest of his – tailored and very handsome – clothes, give away that he is nervous. Restless. Maybe – dare it be said? – a little scared.

_More than a little.  
_  
The thought makes him profoundly uncomfortable.

Malfoys are not supposed to be any of those, since feelings such as fear are reserved for the people who are not in control of the situation. And Malfoys are always, always in total control of the situation. Always.

Except when they're not.

Like these past seven months.

And especially like right now.

Draco rubs his thumb against his index finger to keep himself from gnawing his fingernails or his knuckles.

Potter is two minutes late.

Hundreds of scenarios have crossed Draco's mind. Maybe Potter didn't get the owl and somebody else entirely sent that last note to him. This note is well-folded and frayed now from all the times he has validated and re-validated what it says. He is currently carrying it around in his right trouser pocket – he knows it's there because he just checked half a minute ago. _May's Café, tomorrow, Wednesday, 5 pm. Agreed. HP  
_

Or maybe Potter got held up at work, or at home. Perhaps he cannot find this café in the Muggle part of London, small and hidden as it was between two flashy clothes stores and behind a stubbornly parked furniture lorry as well as a veil of drizzling English February rain. These seem very likely to Draco.

Most other rationalisations are located further towards the 'unlikely' end of the spectrum. Perhaps Potter got mugged on the way. Or maybe he got mauled by a herd of angry centaurs on his job – Merlin know what Aurors are up to exactly these days. Perhaps he splinched himself while apparating because his determination had wavered significantly as he remembered whom he was going to see. Draco imagines him lying bleeding on the pavement as the Muggles pass by him, thinking that he was another drunk homeless person.

Unlikely rationalisations, maybe, but persistent.

All these explanations for Potter's tardiness – three minutes now – prance through his mind in the vain effort to fend off the one, most glaringly likely rationale, the one that makes Draco physically sick and break out in cold sweat.

Because Harry Potter might have simply chosen not to come. He might have changed his mind. Draco already sees him in his mind's eye as he is discarding his very formal and polite letters – addressed to a 'Mr Harold J. Potter, Head Auror to the Ministry of Magic, London, Order of Merlin, First Class', opened with 'Esteemed Auror Potter', for Mordred's sake – whose politeness and formality only managed to veil very thinly the utter desperation and shame which had driven him to writing – and then posting – them in the first place.

Draco knows he owes Potter quite a lot. His life, for starters. That, on top of the fact that he had given the man seven atrocious years worth of reasons to _not_ do him a single, solitary favour for the rest of his existence is more than enough for Draco to see why Harry Potter wouldn't come. It only makes sense.

In fact, some part of his brain is so convinced of the logic of Potter not showing up that it takes him three full seconds to notice Potter standing right in front of him.

"Potter!", Draco exclaims ungracefully, wondering how he could have missed the man walking in through the door since everything about his appearance is magnetic to the eye, as per usual. "You came!"

He realizes that somewhere between the one exclamation and the other he has risen to his feet, so his body goes through the motions of offering a hand to shake – mannerisms carved into him indelibly by his mother – but in the middle of reaching out he remembers who is standing in front of him, so the abortive handshake becomes the most awkward, erratic quasi-chair-pointing motion ever.

Potter looks on with knitted brows, irritated with a hint of worry. "Yes, I apparently did." He speaks slowly, quietly and deliberately, like one would speak to a child. Or a madman. "I wrote I would. You must've got my last owl, or you wouldn't be here, yeah?"

"Yes. Yes, I did. Of course." Draco pats his pant pocket reflexively. _But I judged you by my standards,_ he thinks but does not say.

"You have me intrigued and maybe a little worried," Potter says to him and "Just some water for me, please, thanks," to the waiter. He sits down in the chair on the other side of the table that Draco finds decidedly too small for comfort - _or maybe I'm just being overly sensitive._

"Your letter was cryptic enough, so I'm sufficiently wound up for you to just get straight to the point," Potter says and leans back, visibly at ease which Draco almost hates him for, and adds an offhanded "If you would" which quickly dispels all ideas – ludicrous, insane ideas – that Draco might have entertained about this meeting.

Not even a passing remark about how they hadn't really seen or talked to each other in years and years, how things had changed, how they both had grown up and started families and how their kids got along much better than they themselves did at Hogwarts. No time for talk about the bad old times either. That was probably for the best, but it still stung a little.

Also, it didn't buy him any more time to stave off the inevitable. The cause of all of this – the whole scene and the fuss, his sweaty palms and his flights of fancy – it had to be admitted to. _Straight to the point._ The highest hurdle first.

So he breathes in, looks Potter in the eye the best he can and tells him.

"It seems," he says and is astonished that it sounds light and steady, as if he were talking about the eternally bad English weather, "that I desperately want to have sex with you."

/ **TBC**


	2. Chapter 1

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama.

/  
_  
Whoa, you're still here!_

_Warning: Uhm, smut. Slashy smut. I am not a good person. Enjoy._

/

**-/Chapter 1/-**

/

He leans in as the man motions him to. Their lips meet. The shy contact makes his entire body tingle. The hair on his arms, on his thighs and on the back of his neck stand on end and his skin prickles against the inside of his clothes.

Draco knows that this, all of this, is out of his hands. This time, he must take what is given, he isn't entitled to anything more, he isn't free to make demands. So he doesn't push, even though his lips crave more contact and every inch of his skin yearns for sensation – this time, all he is allowed to do is react. To receive. To endure. And to obey.

He is in his head, too, and it feels like the most natural thing, the presence there that sees everything and listens to his lust-crazed, swirling thoughts. _Beautiful_, he says and funnels the words directly into his mind.

_You are beautiful, Draco. So pale and beautiful. _And then his words become much less delicate, they become obscene as he describes to him in graphic detail what exactly he is of a mind to do to him presently. Draco feels the heat spreading through his body with every shameless syllable.

The man pushes up Draco's sleeves a little and slides his thumbs and fingertips under the sleeve ends to touch him more. It tickles pleasantly and maddeningly when his palms whisper against those upright hairs, and the pads of his thumbs brush over the very sensitive, smooth and almost translucent patches of skin on the undersides of his forearms where his veins criss-cross, blue and green. He knows about the delicate spots just above his wrists, he knows that being touched there so tenderly may drive him insane. With deliberateness he lets his fingertips trace little tracks. When Draco starts to tremble from this teasing, he finally relents and lets his hands travel further upwards where the sensation is slightly dulled by the fabric of his shirt, to his shoulders. To his back. Up his spine to his exposed neck.

_Do you desire me?_

Draco just exhales in response.

_I desire you. I desire you badly._

Where there were only fingertips, teasing and cautions, suddenly there are strong hands that clutch at him and pull him close forcefully. The formerly chaste kiss – that feathery contact of lips – becomes hungry, fierce, then bruising and Draco moans like grown men aren't supposed to moan any more just because of a kiss. Still, he moans into his mouth because he needs to and in his mind there is a low chuckle, a satisfied growl, and then more shameless obscenities and in his mouth there is a hot, hard tongue slick against his own and oh, _oh_ god.

Then, the man's hand reaches down and grabs his crotch firmly, almost roughly. All his breath whistles out of his body at once – Draco knows the abruptness, the unpredictability, the fierceness that makes him feel like the prey of an animal sometimes. He likes it immensely, it sends hot and cold shivers up his spine, but he is always surprised all over again when he pounces. Surprised by the ferocity of his lust for him.

Draco hastily sucks the breath back in when the man starts to massage his swollen cock through the fabric of his trousers.

_Take off your clothes._

It requires determination to focus on his own hands. His buttons open with agonizing slowness since his fingers are clumsy. The unceasing movements between his legs are extremely distracting.

_I want to see you naked and spread before me._

The man actually laughs as the stiff member in his palm noticeably twitches in response.

The shirt is finally open, revealing his chest and his stiffened nipples, and the man's lustful gaze rakes over both so mercilessly that Draco shivers. But as he shrugs the garment off his shoulders he realizes that, overeager, he has forgotten to open the buttons on his cuffs. His hands are caught. He swears.

His gracelessness elicits another scoffing laugh, and then a word muttered under his breath. Suddenly his shirt twists like a living thing and winds itself around his wrists and arms and interlocks them behind his back. The force of it makes him bend at the waist, makes him lean forward slightly.

The man steps up to him, close enough to him that Draco can rest his cheek on his hard chest. He inhales deeply that warm, human scent that seeps from his clothes as the man resumes the undressing in his stead. He pulls the belt out of its loops and puts it around Draco's neck instead. He makes it a little tight, so a thrill of heat flares through Draco's body when he finds that he can't breathe for a moment.

Then he opens Draco's trouser button and his fly and pushes the waistband over his arse until the fabric falls to the floor by itself, pools around his ankles and over his bare feet. The feeling of the air on his throbbing prick makes Draco moan through clenched teeth.

Draco remembers his order – _spread before me_ has been his demand. So he complies. Still bent forward, he steps out of the remnants of his trousers, turns around and half kneels, half lies on the bed, the side of his face pressed onto the sheets, one eye looking back at the man behind him who holds the makeshift leash and eats his naked body with his eyes.

_Yes, yes._

The man licks his lips slowly. The pink wetness of his tongue tip makes Draco shiver. He sticks out his arse further and spread his legs a little wider. Just for him to see.

_Yes, Draco. You are mine._

He reaches out.

And Draco wakes up.

/

He sits up and blinks against the sunlight. He is aroused and he doesn't remember why.

And not only is he physically stiff – he's actually, emotionally and psychologically excited. There is a wet spot on the inside of the front of his underpants. He is sweaty all over, breathing hard and his heart is thumping wildly in his chest.

He lies back again with a sigh to be enveloped by his pillow as if by a feathery lover and closes his eyes. It takes hardly a minute of gentle rubbing and very little imagination – just shapes and silhouettes, faint sounds, the idea of a rough and passionate kiss the like of which he has never experienced personally – to get himself off with a stifled sigh.

When he is done and the short afterglow has faded – it always does so woefully quickly and abruptly – he curses, reaches for his wand and quickly cleans himself up.

He hasn't had a problem with morning wood since he was fifteen or so. But now he's thirty-seven years old and this is the fourth time in six days and it's frankly getting a little unsettling.

He gets out of bed and onto his feet, and suddenly the room spins and blurs before his eyes. He moans and grabs the night stand to steady himself until his head clears. It does so very sluggishly.

While he stands there he notices that he is tired enough to just fall back into bed and go right back to sleep. He rubs his eyes and looks at the alarm clock – eight fourteen already. He has slept almost ten hours and still this languidness. He shakes his head like a wet dog which only causes the world to tilt oddly.

He gets dressed with increasing haste but decreasing skill – he steps into the right trouser leg with his left leg not once but twice and curses himself rather creatively – and stops by the kitchen only for a coffee rather than a proper breakfast.

Astoria is there, sitting at the coffee table and reading the _Prophet_. She greets him with a "Did you read that poor excuse of a column by that Lovegood person? What did the editors even think? And this is what I paid for" and scans him quickly up and down over the edge of the newspaper to see if she can warrant him leaving the house like that.

On other days, Draco finds this almost endearing. That look is something of a last bastion, an echo of a relationship long past.

Today, though, with the haste and the stress, the blooming headache and the lead-heavy tiredness, he just wished she would keep her complaints as well as her scrutinizing looks to herself.

While he waits for the cooling spell to bring his coffee to consumption temperature, for the fifth day in a row he becomes imminently aware of how quiet the kitchen is, now that Scorpius is away.

An unusual longing suddenly overcomes him – a longing for his son's mere presence, the dishevelled, prepubescent sight of him and his noisy little habits, the things Draco usually frowns upon but doesn't dare to say anything against because he's somewhat afraid that that is what Lucius would have done – and is suppressed until only a little wistful sigh remains. If Astoria hears it, she doesn't comment. Draco is thankful for small mercies.

He wishes he had time to go to the east wing living room and switch on the TV his son had wheedled them into buying the year before. Just for the noises.

The calender says 9th of September – it has been more than a week already. Scorpius has written four times, but three of the letters he had addressed to his mother. So far, Astoria has been nice enough to read them at the table so he could take part at least once. After reading, however, she takes them upstairs and keeps them in her quarters so Draco can't just go and read them again if he wants to. Even though he really wants to. Scorpius' handwriting is the exact opposite of his when he was young. Scorpius writes like he talks, and Draco misses hearing the sound of his son talking most of all.

The one letter that was for him was shorter than the other three – at least Draco is irrationally convinced that it was – and mostly contained directions for locating Scorpius' broom maintenance set which he had left at home and now wanted sent after him for unspecified reasons. Probably for showing off. Which might be a good thing – it meant that he had found other kids to show off to. Not that Draco had ever really worried about that.

Draco thinks of the day at Kings Cross Station when he had to part ways with his Scorpius for the first long time in his life. He remembers with cutting clarity how Scorpius didn't seem to mind at all and took it all in stride without so much as a backward glance, got on that train, waved once, and then was gone. Inevitably, he thinks of all the familiar faces gathered there – Greg and Millicent with their triplets, Pansy and her narky, pubertal offspring – called Brice and Briony, often and shrilly by their mother – and Blaise showing his adopted son off to Hogwarts for the last time already, the boy half a head taller than his dad.

And all those others, too. Blasts from the past. Such a faraway past, it seemed downright unreal.

He is glad that Scorpius hasn't mentioned any of the Potter or Weasley kids in his letters. There were several of them running around on the station, one looking more unsettlingly like its parents than the next. And Weasley had seemed to whisper something to his daughter with a sideways glance at Scorpius, too, that had Draco slightly worried. Said daughter looked like a perfect alloy of mother and father. _Merciful Merlin_ had been the thought most prominent in his head upon seeing her.

Strangely enough, Potter senior had looked quite unlike himself, Draco remembers. He wonders if he has become so used to seeing him in the newspapers that his brain cannot process him in colour, three dimensions and somewhat smaller than he seems in the still-frequent _Prophet_ pictures.

All the same, there had been something profoundly odd about that moment. Their eyes had met briefly over the crowd, and Draco had seen something there that – whatever it was, it just didn't quite fit with his expectations. As if it wasn't _really_ Potter. As if there was something missing from him. Or, perhaps, as if there was some sort of surplus, something more that wasn't supposed to be there, but he couldn't figure out what it was.

Hiding the jolt it had given him, Draco had nodded at him and Potter had nodded back, just as a mutual acknowledgement of the other's existence. The next time he had looked up, the whole gang consisting of Ex-Gryffindors, current Gryffindors and Gryffindors in spe, had been gone, out of sight in the hustle and bustle and all the engine steam from the train that was about to steal all their children away from them for long months.

Draco sips his coffee twice and then ends up pouring it away because it tastes sickeningly sweet for no good reason at all.

He goes to work, tired and stressed out, with his stomach cramping and empty. For once, he is glad that his day is busy and his work mostly mechanical. It helps him take his mind off of his worries, and off his thoughts that insist on revolving either around the meeting at King's Cross and that ridiculous nagging feeling that something had just been _off_, or around his son who is thousands of miles away and doesn't mind whatsoever – which should make it all easier but actually only makes it harder, in a way.

When he comes home in the evening, he has a rich dinner he wolfs down but doesn't enjoy like he knows he should, a long, hot bath – he dozes off twice in the tub and only gets out when his skin is all pink and pruney – and eventually falls asleep in his bed with the book he set out to read ('1001 potions to brew before you die') on his chest and the night stand light still on.

This night, he is the one plundering his mouth, the one pulling him close demandingly, making him beg and sigh and moan. Fair is fair.

Nine hours later he wakes up to the persistent chime of his alarm clock. While his conscious mind doesn't remember a thing, his body does.

The cycle starts anew.

/ **TBC**

_Give that author a comment. Authors love comments._


	3. Chapter 2

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Thanks to __Vampira612 for following this story!  
_  
_So because of me uploading the first two chapters at once, ff dot net did not list this as a "new" story. I am only slightly upset._

_If you're still with me in spite of that, be ye warned. This is where the plot starts to thicken._

/

**-/Chapter 2/-  
**

/

Potter stares at him as if he were waiting for a punchline. Quite contrary to what Draco had imagined it over and over, he doesn't get up wordlessly and leaves, and there is also no trace of seething anger or nameless disgust on his face – none that is visible to him, anyway. Draco involuntarily files that observation away for himself to relentlessly obsess over later on.

"The fact of the matter is," he continues, dry-mouthed but anxious to get it out of his system, as long as Potter's patient silence and his own reckless bravery last, "I seem to be so desperate that, in my head, I've slept with you countless times."

Naturally, the waiter had decided to deliver Potter's sparkling water that very second. He pours the water from the dainty, brand-named bottle into the glass in which a slice of lemon is already floating, smiles and nods at Potter, then leaves them and looks so emphatically straight ahead that it's clear that he had definitely caught that last sentence.

Draco fights a hopeless fight against colour rising to his cheeks, and anger – mostly at himself for being obvious. Another thing his father had taught him was unbecoming of a Malfoy.

"So, uh." Potter ticks his index finger against his glass. It makes little holes into the white sheen of condensation. "Is this what this entire song and dance was about? Just letting me know that-"

"No. No, of course not. That would be-" Preposterous. Pretentious? "Inappropriate," he finishes and it sounds like he is mumbling to himself.

_What the hell am I doing here? _He rubs his neck. Two days ago contacting him and making him privy to his... _situation_ had seemed like the only choice he had, and hence the best choice to be made. Now he wasn't quite so certain.

Over from the counter, the waiter glances into their general direction and Draco can't help but think that he is looking at him in particular.

Within the second, the young man is actually a wizard, too, even though he is working in the most Muggle café in all of West London, and has somehow escaped Draco's scrutiny even though he has visited this establishment yesterday evening to secure the surroundings. An undercover wizard – probably hired by his wife _and_ the press –, so good at deception that even Draco's vendor's senses were fooled, specifically trained to eavesdrop on this particular conversation-

Draco shakes his head and pinches the bridge of his nose. The waiter is just a waiter again, a curious but clueless Muggle, and his glance – if it is meant for him at all – carries no malice or outright judgement.

That last thought is painfully ephemeral.

He wonders if it is even possible for him now to be looked at without immediately being weighed, measured and found wanting. Wanting, and worse.

"I just wished to, uhm, avoid... I mean, I figured I just get the most, uh, thorny part of the whole story over with right away. To not waste anyone's time- Look, could you cast a silencing spell or something?" he asks Potter, fidgeting in his chair which is suddenly uncomfortable to sit in.

"Why don't you cast it yourself?" Potter asks back and looks into the waiter's direction as well.

"Didn't bring a wand," Draco admits.

Curiously, Potter seems more taken aback by this than by his previous confession of intense and twisted sexual fantasies. After another moment of hesitation, and with another surreptitious glance at the staff and the three other guests, Potter gets his wand out and murmurs a spell to either muffle or transmogrify their conversation for outsider's ears. Draco assumes that it is some Auror spell, he has never heard it before.

Suddenly, there is a strong sense of déjà vu as the spell is washing over them both. Draco fights it down. London. _London_, not Copenhagen. May's Café, not _Noma_. It's Potter, it's not her.

"So. You have- uh. Dreams about- us." Potter tucks the wand back as neatly and thoroughly as no wand has ever been tucked back before. "Together."

"Frequently, and unsettlingly, yes, and, I assure you, entirely against my will," Draco comments without strictly meaning to. It just slips out. _Just like things used to slip out with her. _He clenches his fist.

"Then maybe you should see a therapist about that or something," Potter suggests with a lifted eyebrow.

Draco can't help the sad laugh that comes out as a huff of air through his nose. "Funny you should say that."

/

"She's calling him 'daddy' now, you should see her when she talks about him. It's like she adores him, it's heart-melting, especially since Martin adores her right back and spoils her rotten. I never thought she'd take it all in stride, but I guess adults tend to generally underestimate kids when it comes to such things. I think there's really no reason for me _not_ to marry the guy now. You're not listening, are you?"

"Wh-yes, no, I am." He stifles a yawn until his larynx hurts and his eyes water which he tries to conceal by pretending interest in a bird chirping on a branch outside.

Daphne looks at him with a cocked eyebrow and pursed lips – a look that must be in the Greengrass females' genes because her sister has it, too, and their mother as well, and Draco loathes to find himself at the receiving end of it every single time.

"I've had a rough day," he says by the way of an admission and the Greengrass glare softens marginally.

It's not a lie – the past twelve hours had been unpleasant. Whenever a Ministry person so much as set a foot into his shop, it was enough to entirely ruin his day. Today, there had been two of them, and they had rifled through his stock. With a warrant. Signed by Hermione _goddamn_ Granger hyphen _screw her to hell_ Weasley. As if there was any chance that, even if he had helped Nott brew that Mickey Finn potion, or helped Nott in making it, he would just let the ingredients and incriminating evidence lie around in his shop. Jerks.

That was enough to wreck the day and the rest of week along with it.

"According to what Tory tells me, you've been having a whole string of rough ones lately."

This was as close any Greengrass would ever get to a 'How are you?', Draco supposed.

"I'm surprised that Astoria would say such things," he replies non-committally and sips on his beverage. Firewhiskey. Very old and very good – meaning 'rather more expensive than any bottle of beverage had any right to be' – Firewhiskey, the one with the pleasant after taste of oak resin his parents treasured. It's sad how hard it is to appreciate the good things in life when one is tired. It feels like he's just wasting it by pouring it into himself.

"What, to me, or generally?" Daphne cocks her head so her Hollywood curls spill down forward over her shoulder. "You know, she might not be the most caring and considerate person alive, but even she starts to worry a little when her husband becomes a sleepless zombie for a month."

Draco is saved from having to comment by his niece Diana – step-niece to be exact, but no one was that fastidious – skipping into the winter garden where he and Daphne had set up their coffee and cake. Plus whiskey, in defiance of being sternly ordered from the considerably warmer, cosier kitchen by Astoria and Diana.

Diana, wearing multicoloured flour virtually all over her face, her hair and her dress, is so excited about showing her mum the cake she has made with her auntie that she is literally bouncing up and down. Draco thinks she is an adorable kid, pure of heart and surprisingly well-mannered given her parentage, but he doesn't know if it's appropriate to ever say so out loud, or to whom. Probably not to her mother, or her mother's sister.

"I'll be right there, sweet pea," Daphne tells her and shoos her away before she can get the flour all over her mother as well. Draco looks after her with stinging, tired eyes and wonders how it must feel to have so much energy.

"You know," his sister-in-law eventually continues after Diana has happily skipped along, "if it sets your mind at rest, she didn't tell me about it, like, spontaneously. I had been telling her about Plutus' shop in Knockturn Alley and how his clientèle is absolutely satisfied with his products – you know, he has specialized in remedies for the more particular and private afflictions of the soul, and they're all but buying them like hot cakes."

The way she says 'soul' makes it sound like it were something dirty and scandalous.

"Several V.I.P.s rank among the customers, at least according to word of mouth. The burnout-remedies and counselling against eating disorders and alcoholism are the top sellers, Plutus says they have met with a ready market. Martin has let me know he might actually take up the offer and participate on an equity basis – Plutus doesn't stop nagging him about it, even though they hadn't wanted to make it a father-and-son business. But anyway," she tosses her hair with a sigh and gets up from her chair to finally see to Diana and that cake. "Tory merely mentioned that it might be a good idea for you to a look at that merchandise as well, and I have to say, you look like you need it."

She waits for a moment to give him the opportunity to answer or to defend himself, but he is not inclined to do either. Instead, he suppresses another yawn.

"Honestly, Draco. If you want a private session at the shop I could arrange that for you. I'll just ask Martin and he'll let his father know, it won't be a big deal. They're more discreet than the other health care professionals you could consult and they really know their business – plus, they'd totally give you a discount. You are virtually family, after all."

Under other circumstances he might have been offended at the implication that he needed either therapy or a rebate, but really, he is just exhausted and at his wits' end. It isn't like he hadn't tried to dose himself with sleeping draughts and nerve-calming potions and even a concoction that was supposed to keep his unnerving matutinal, physical reactions at bay when it had only served to make him piss blood for a fortnight. He still doesn't know what had gone wrong with that potion, and he is still angry about the thirty five galleons worth of ingredients he wasted on it.

It is hardly surprising to Draco that Daphne's not-quite-but-almost father-in-law makes a fortune on his products. There are no doctors for 'those kinds' of problems in the Wizarding World that he knows of, and even if there were, he would earlier run down Diagon Alley wearing nothing but a leopard print thong and a sparkly birthday hat than let himself be seen entering their surgery. The Malfoy pride and the Malfoy reputation – they might be shrivelled and tarnished, but they are still extant. At least he likes to tell himself that from time to time.

So he just nods to her and says, "I'll think about it." And finds himself more than a little unnerved that he actually means it, too.

His sister-in-law seems content and leaves him behind in his winter garden, to ponder on how he cannot appreciate how beautifully his fuchsias are growing or how rich the Firewhiskey tastes and how it sparkles in the sun because he is so very, very-

He falls asleep in his chair, chin sunken down onto his chest, and wakes with a start half an hour later when Diana nudges his cheek with a flour-coated finger. She asks him whether he wants some cake as well and her huge blue eyes really allow him no choice. He lets himself be tugged to his heavy feet by her dainty, floury hands and slogs along into the kitchen where Diana and Astoria have created a cake that looks like the blue horse from My Little Pony. Although the rainbow tail and parts of the hind legs are already missing, it's still galloping on the tray and cheerfully grinning up at him.

He hesitates – endures – another week before he finally sends his sister-in-law a letter.

/ **TBC**


	4. Chapter 3

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Thank you, BadGirlgoesworse, for the reviews!  
_

_Ff dot net had server troubles and didn't let me log in, so I'm a bit late. Sorry! This one's a bit longer and introduces a bunch of original characters. Let me know what you think, y'all!_

/

**-/Chapter 3/-**

/**  
**  
"Mr Malfoy. Finally we have the chance to strike up the acquaintance."

After years of working behind the counter of his little shop and having to do with clients, Draco cannot help but form an opinion on Mr Ransom Plutus Boothe before they even shake hands.

Boothe visibly used to be a muscular, beefy man, but he is in his mid-sixties now and while the additional weight he once put on remained, it has lost the shape. His greenish grey eyes are oddly close together, giving him a constant calculating expression. Like his fingernails, his teeth are yellowed from cigarettes which Draco can see as he smiles at him. Despite the fact that it's almost a genuine smile – at least insofar as it's not a blatantly threatening gesture in principle – there's something immediately disagreeable about R. P. Boothe that has Draco cautious and reserved.

Mostly, it's the cologne. It's not overwhelming, but cloying and sticks thickly to the back of his throat.

Draco nods and smiles resolutely through his discomfort, tapping into the same reservoir of blank-faced patience and distance he always accesses when Ministry minions show up at his shop. "It seems we have, indeed. It couldn't possibly be avoided any longer."

The belly laugh this gets is as fake as his own smile. "I say!" The man claps him on the back and guides him inside through the back door of his shop, shutting Knockturn Alley's hindmost corner behind them.

"But all joking aside, Mr Malfoy – Draco. I can call you Draco, surely? And you can call me Plutus, like everyone does – I've had the genealogists go over the family tree once more, just for the occasion. It seems we are not only related by love and marriage, through Martin and dear Daphne and Astoria, but that we share an ancestor in the sixteen hundreds. Watch your head," he interjects as he leads Draco through the labyrinthine bowels of the ancient edifice. "That ancestor had six children, two of which followed him to New England later on – this is the root of the Boothe family line. Of the two who stayed, one had a daughter who married into the Malfoy family to bring forth your very own seven-times great-grandfather. Isn't it marvellous? If I were superstitious, I would say it was fate that brought the family back together in this fashion, but in fact, it was my beautiful hopefully soon-to-be officially daughter-in-law. This way, please."

Draco is lead further through the back of the shop, or what used to be private quarters, hotel corridors and storage rooms of the taverns and other businesses that the building had accommodated before.

As they pass an open door, Draco gets a glimpse a little chamber, magically light-filled due to lack of windows or lamps, completely, blindingly white like a hospital room and empty except for a table with three chairs and a brown leather Davenport couch next to a small, empty side table.

Suddenly, all of this seems like a bad idea. Draco thinks about how baring merely his feet in public would be a challenge to him – so why on earth would he agree to bare his mind in front of another person? Lying on one of those sofas helplessly, his life being prised open like an oyster...

His entire body starts to itch in his second-best two-piece suit which he originally chose for comfort and for making an impression – intimidation, that is. It is failing on both accounts, he can feel it. The next time he sees Plutus face when the man looks over his shoulder, his yellow-toothed smile definitely looks more like a knowing leer to him.

Before Draco can actually stop, come up with some excuse and turn on his heel, they have already arrived at the shop. A narrow, short flight of stairs leads out into the actual exhibition area through a door marked 'Staff Only' from the shop side.

The shop is spacious for a London locale, light and airy, in colours from fawn to eggshell, and smells faintly of sandalwood. There is an indoor fountain that gurgles delicately as water is coming directly out of the wall, trickling down a small waterfall, dripping down slick black stones and from the ends of green twigs, and collecting in a wide basin made of grey granite. The water catches the light and paints bright, rippling bands at the ceiling above it. At the bottom of the granite basin, several knuts and sickles sparkle.

Beside all this distracting display, the actual merchandise sits in its glass cases and shelves and looks like it is trying to not attract any attention. Draco sees it nonetheless and is immediately reminded of Albus Dumbledore's office. Many strange little devices, some silvery, some coppery, most hidden in little boxes that look like treasure chests wrapped in velvet or decoratively draped with silk cloth, bottles filled with colourful liquids, brummagem jewellery dangling off moving statuettes, polished stones catching the light.

Intriguingly, there is a woman standing right in the middle of it all, poised like a lion tamer in the middle of the circus ring. Draco glances at her in what he hopes is a polite, cursory way.

She is an immensely attractive woman. At least five, possibly ten years his junior. Obviously not of British origin, since her skin and hair are both several shades darker than the average northern European's. She is wearing a white blouse and straight, dark pants combined with a grey cloak that London Muggles might take for a poncho. It still doesn't hide her stunning figure.

"It's only natural that a blood relative should enjoy maximum comfort," Plutus recaptures his attention, "so we made sure that the windows are sealed for privacy, and it goes without saying that we closed shop an hour ago. I have appointed my most knowledgeable assistant to attend to your needs specifically. Draco Malfoy, this is Miss Layla Na'amah, my trusted associate. She is under an oath spell that assures secrecy, and she carries with her a flask of certified truth serum, should you ever doubt the accuracy of her advice."

Layla Na'amah, the very attractive woman with a name that fits her exotic and graceful exterior like a glove, smiles with dignity and curtseys with an air of humour. There is nothing lilac about her, though. Her eyes are very brown, like liquid dark chocolate or coffee, framed by thick, long, dark lashes and nicely curved brows. That is the first thing that Draco notices about her, now that he is allowed to do more than just dart a glance at her – her captivating, mesmerizing eyes that look at him as if through a veil and straight into his soul. The second is the curl of her lip. It is there, hidden just in the left corner, ever so slightly as if she is laughing about a private little joke.

He answers her curtsey with a slight nodding of the head and a mumbled "Miss Na'amah."

Plutus takes his leave with great circumstance and again assures Draco that every length will be gone to in order to ensure a congenial shopping experience and his satisfaction.

Another handshake and an awkward slap on the shoulder later, he is alone with Layla and her Mona Lisa smile and her glittering dark eyes that meet his so readily that it makes him feel strangely exposed.

Strangely, because he has never felt good exposed before, but he does now.

Layla lifts her eyebrows and asks, "Shall we?"

For a moment, Draco is not sure what exactly she means, but agrees without hesitation.

/

Layla turns out to be the subtlest salesperson Draco has ever met. Her voice is quiet, measured and melodious, with just a tiny little accent which doesn't betray her foreign roots as much as her impressively extensive, deftly used vocabulary and her impeccable grammar do. She explains to him in simple but not overly simple terms the nature of the spells and charms and their therapeutic applications that are used in her line of work. To Draco it almost feels like confabulating as they slip easily into a discussion about the basic magic involved, and how experts in many fields and double blind tests are consulted regularly to keep the end product from veering too closely toward vacuous hocuspocus – "We sell that to the Muggles, completely inert crystals, pendulums, tarot cards, prayer beads, oujia boards. Whatever it is, they love it," Layla relates with a decidedly smug look on her face, "Deepak Chopra buys our discard in barrels." – or black magic.

Draco cannot remember the last time he confabulated with anyone. Maybe he never actually has before in his life. He always thought that the authors of novellas of eras past had made the whole thing up, like it was something that didn't happen in reality. Like soliloquies, or neatly arranged combat, or love at first sight.

All the while they are slowly walking around the shop. Counter-clockwise, Draco observes involuntarily. He remembers reading about that – how the direction will affect the psyche of the customer, make him feel comfortable and buy more.

He isn't sure if his feeling good is the effect of their counter-clockwise motion, or might be more directly related to the assistant's presence. And maybe her beguiling perfume which he couldn't help but notice, even though it is as subtle as she is.

"In order to find out which of the therapeutic approaches will yield the most satisfactory results for you personally and specifically," Layla concludes with a gesture that makes the bracelet on her slim wrist glint like the sickles in the well, and Draco asks himself if everyone in this company is contractually obligated to insert the word 'satisfy' and variations of it into conversation as often as humanly possible, "I will first have to diagnose you, naturally. Diagnosis is a process that requires more trust than you currently have in Mr Boothe or me, so it would be unwise to attempt at this point as your guardedness might falsify the results and hamper convalescence."

Hearing this makes Draco speechless for a moment before he can even attempt to deny it. Working in retail, and as a part of the families Malfoy and Greengrass, he isn't used to blunt straightforwardness. Especially not when it goes against every idea of profitableness.

Layla seems faintly amused. "Don't look so shocked, Mr Malfoy. For fear of sounding conceited, I would call myself an expert in human nature – not that one has to be an expert in order to see the defiant set of your mouth, or the frown, or the defensive way you hold your shoulders, and then put two and two together."

She folds her arms and gives him a long, knowing look.

"You don't want to be here. You don't trust anyone here. You don't want to be tricked out of your money. Moreover, you fear being analysed and what you and other people might find. It's only natural. Only dimwits come into this shop excited about the opportunity to pay great amounts of money for having their private, hidden lives dragged to the light. And you are no dimwit, Mr Malfoy."

He is still busy being conscious about his various body parts that apparently betray his thoughts and trying to figure out if this is some reverse psychology sales hook when his mouth settles for an inelegant "Well, then, where do we go from here, Miss Na'amah?"

Which, he reckons, answers his question about the hook, really.

"It's Layla to you, if it pleases you," she says with a tilt of her head, ponders a second and continues, "and from here, we go to Copenhagen, actually."

Draco is momentarily stumped. "Copenhagen? As in, the capital of Denmark?"

"You know your geography. Ten points to Slytherin," says Layla with a coy smile. "Copenhagen – as in, the capital of Denmark – is indeed our destination tonight."

Draco blinks, still baffled. "So, preparations for my-," the word is a little obstinate and requires a little push, "_counselling_ requires me to travel a thousand kilometres for – what exactly?"

"For free," she answers lightly as she ducks under the rope and behind the counter, then vanishes in an adjacent back room. "I already arranged the portkey several months ago. It's for half past seven, which means that we still have forty-five minutes. Enough time to get you a nice tie which is all that's missing from your immaculate attire. Or perhaps a bow tie?"

Whatever she says next isn't audible from his point, so out of courtesy, he follows her lead, ducks under the rope as well – feeling only a little like a trespasser – to better catch her words.

The 'pardon?' gets stuck in his throat when he sees her in the little back room – some sort of a supplies closet – where she is just slipping into a stunning emerald-coloured dress that leaves her shoulders and her back completely bare all the way down to her hips. Underneath that dress, with the exception of an almost non-existent piece of black lace lingerie, she is also bare. Very bare. Hairless, smooth, naked in all the best ways.

Draco turns away hastily, but the sensation of seeing that smooth body and all that silky skin stays as if the sight has imprinted itself on his retinas.

"I said, Mr Malfoy," Layla repeats as she steps out of the room again a moment later, several centimetres taller because of her high heel shoes, and he hesitatingly turns to look at her, hoping against hope that he didn't blush like a schoolboy, "I know it might not necessarily be deemed professional, or gender-appropriate for that matter, but I would like to invite you to the best dinner you ever had."

She arches an eyebrow as if challenging him to contradict, and although he has an abundance of memories of really, really good dinners, he wouldn't dare to object. Especially since his mouth his still very dry.

"I promise there will be no psychoanalysing – well, no unreasonable amounts of it, anyway – and no poking around in your dark, dirty secrets. Just you and me and the wonderful _Noma_ restaurant where I have made a reservation for a table for two last year's December." Her expression darkens ever so slightly. "Back in the day, it was meant for me and my ex who, well. He is indisposed due to chronic unfaithfulness." She sighs, then quickly sheds the glumness with apparent ease. "So now here I am, in a gorgeous borrowed dress and shoes that might kill me before the evening is over, with a portkey that is already paid for and a reservation for two, and loathe to go alone. All I need is a man whose elbow I can cling to while trying not to break my ankles in these shoes, a man who is not a dimwit and looks sharp in a suit."

She comes up close to him – he realizes they are now eye to eye when before he had to look down ever so slightly – and loops a dark grey bow tie around his neck. Fastens it adroitly. Straightens it more thoroughly than is strictly necessary. Or maybe it is necessary, depending on what exactly it was before she transformed it into a bow tie.

So close to her, he notices that her skin is the colour of dark caramel. Flawless, too, except for some fine lines that just belong in the face of a woman who has left girlhood behind. He already noticed her eyes, her lashes, her brows and her lips, but up close, he has the chance to furthermore appreciate the curve of her cheeks and the little dimples in them, the almost complete straightness of her nose and the overall, pleasantly perfect symmetry of her face. _By Merlin, you are beautiful.  
_

"And you, Mr Malfoy, fit the requirements quite nicely." She looks him in the eyes and he is caught aback once more. The last person to look him in the eyes like she does was Scorpius when he was seven or eight years old. That is long ago already, and his son has dropped that habit long since, assimilated to the behaviours of the people around him. Draco isn't used to being looked at so straight, not to mention by a beautiful woman with such stunning eyes, and it is scary and exciting in equal shares.

"It's Draco to you," he manages and she smiles.

/

/

"Layla Na'amah is probably not her real name," he relates and sees the woman smiling in his mind's eye. He can't help but think how gorgeous she is and wonders desperately if she will ever stop being beautiful in his memory. He has the sinking feeling that she will be conserved for all eternity, like a corpse in an airless coffin made of diamonds. "Still, it fits her, since it sounds a lot like liar," he adds quietly and takes a sip of cappuccino. It doesn't wash the bitter taste from his mouth.

_I thought that that slut of a counsellor would've managed to fuck you by now, like she said you would the second you got the chance.  
_  
There is a pause, broken by the hiss of the milk-frother.

"So," Potter prompts after five seconds of silence, and Draco, irritated, almost asks him if he's got somewhere better to be. Almost, because he can already guess the answer and he doesn't like it, nor does he want to hear it. "What about this woman whose name wasn't really Layla Na'amah?"

He contemplates giving her a moniker so he doesn't have to hear her name over and over, for it will just serve to stir up memories like flocks of dirt in a duck pond.

Nofretete? Beauty and cunning and cruelty.

Lilith? She sure seemed like a succubus demon to him, but at least she hadn't had any children from him.

Or perhaps Calypso, because she kept a husband away from his wife.

Then again, Penelope actually wanted Odysseus to come home, so maybe it's not really that fitting a name at all, either.

Layla. Layla. Lie-la. She dances through his mind barefooted in her dark green dress.

"She works... or worked for Boothe. She was introduced to me as the very knowledgeable assistant-plus-therapist who was to... diagnose me and help me find a solution to my problems." He paused, pondered for a second. Finally, he admitted, "And she did. She really did." He sighs and wishes he knew how to say that without feeling like screaming.

/ **TBC**

_Leave a comment. Make my day._


	5. Chapter 4

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Thank you, Collette Nicole, for your review! I do hope you're looking forward to more than a 'few' chapters, though, because this story is massive. Something around 65k words - the longest I ever wrote. Hopefully it can engage your attention! _

_And thanks to Anonymous Miki for fav'ing and following! _

_Another fairly long chapter. Lots of foreshadowing for all those who are still paying attention ;P Bit of smut there toward the end. Enjoy, dearies!_

/

**-/Chapter 4/-**

/

Just shy of one hour later, they walk the streets of picturesque Copenhagen at dusk, with night falling rapidly around them and the air full of the smell of the sea. Exactly as promised, she is clinging to his elbow for support as she navigates the occasional cobblestones and the treacherous manhole covers. The clicking of her heels is the loudest sound. It seems to Draco that the city is holding its breath.

"You have been taciturn since the portkeys."

They had taken the portkey from London to Rotterdam, and another from Rotterdam to Kiel before finally ending up in a dark, Muggle-repellant alley of the Danish capital.

"It is not my favourite means of transportation," he says instead of really answering the question. And it's true, portkeys do make him dizzy and give him headaches, on top of the headache from sheer tiredness he is constantly lugging around with him these past few weeks.

More to the point, though, the controls on portkeys were much too strict for his tastes which dampens his spirits considerably. The idea that four different governments – English, Dutch, German, Danish – now have records of him coming and leaving in the company of Miss Na'amah is not one he relishes.

He doesn't really want anyone to know that he is having a dinner with any woman. Who he's having dinner with and where in general is no one's business whatsoever.

But only when they entered the portkey station in Islington and the clerk looked the two of them up and down with his little pig eyes – and then looked Layla up and down again – Draco suddenly became concerned about people knowing he was having a dinner particularly with _this_ woman. This woman who is currently pressing her braless breast against his upper arm – a strikingly attractive and very memorable employee of what is, at the end of the day, nothing more than a wizard shrink with a merchandise outlet in the front.

It does not take an expert to put two and two together here, either.

Next time, he might as well just use the front door during peak business period, or put a notice right next to Luna Lovegood's godawful _Prophet_ column to let everyone know about his lack of psychological well-being.

"And you're already second-guessing your accepting my invitation, too," Layla adds and glances at his face quickly, then down to her feet again as she steps carefully around the cracks.

"I'm grateful for your invitation," he says flatly even though he knows that it makes him sound stupid since it's not even close to a response to her allegation. He can't get any closer, though – not without lying anyway.

There is something about Layla that makes him certain that telling lies would only give her more leverage, only disclose even more about him.

"Are you worried about your wife?"

That actually makes him falter, frown and stop short of saying 'There was no need whatsoever to mention Astoria' in a rather frosty way.

Layla catches his dark expression even though he has turned his face away and smiles. "No, you're not," she answers her own question with a wise little nod. "Good. I wouldn't have taken you for the kind of man who has to ask his wife for permission to go out until late at night with strange women."

'She doesn't ask me permission, either' is on the tip of his tongue, but he swallows it back down quickly and instead settles for "It all depends on how late the nights and how strange the women are exactly," and it even comes out with a breezy hint of flirtation that he is oddly pleased with.

Layla merely arches an eyebrow at him with an amused curl of her lip.

Draco looks at her and decides that maybe it is worth the effort of shoving his concerns aside and, just for this one night, pretend that he is just a random man. That random man isn't spied on by his government because of a wrong decision he made decades ago and without having a choice, and he isn't married to a woman whose skinny love had trickled through his fingers like water. This random man isn't chronically tired and strung-out after getting out of bed in the morning. He is lucky enough to go out with a beautiful woman in a beautiful city to an outrageously expensive and coveted restaurant, and that beautiful woman is not really a sales rep for a dubious business company whose services are employed only by men who are both socially compelled and mentally entirely unable to succeed in pretending all these things, even for one night.

Suddenly he wants nothing more than to lie down, to sleep, forget all about Layla in her breathtakingly revealing dress and her enticing scent and Boothe's disreputable venture, he wants to stop thinking about how his life is a tiring struggle void of definite direction but they've already arrived at the restaurant.

Past a short queue of people, she pulls him inside ever so subtly while making it look like he is leading her until he all but believes it himself.

/

Their table at is next to the window, allowing for a view of the harbour whose calm, dark waters are full of glittering reflections.

The next table is slightly too close for easy conversation, so after the waiter has taken their orders – Layla ordered for both of them, and in Danish, so Draco is forced to sit and wait for whatever she requested – Layla inconspicuously produces her wand from her purse and mutters two short incantations. Draco recognizes only one of them as a spell to generally deflect attention.

"It's a spell that changes the words eavesdroppers will hear." She slips the wand back into the purse and snaps it shut. Draco looks around casually, but nobody noticed anything. "Just in case."

"In case what?" he asks. Not looking at her cleavage is more difficult than he had hoped. Strangely, looking at her mouth feels equally socially unacceptable and almost naughty. And he can't constantly meet her eyes, either, so he settles for looking at her nose and her cheeks.

"In case you spontaneously feel the need of spilling dark secrets, of course," she answers and leans back in her chair. "I value privacy and I believe you appreciate it, too."

"Miss Na'amah, why do I have the feeling that you already know everything I could tell you anyway?"

Layla throws him a candid look and opens her mouth to reply just as their waiter arrives at the table with their food and wine. He explains the details of the comestibles in English with a heavy Czech accent. Anyone who didn't grow up surrounded by food of the highest possible quality – and then went to a school whose feasts were more than a bit of all right – would have been thoroughly impressed.

They eat in relative silence, to better appreciate the taste and artistry. They take turns commenting on the quality of the food and drink but neither would interrupt the meal with any other topic.

To Draco, it almost feels like Christmas dinner with his parents again, only that the silence is not quite as stony – they are surrounded by people engaged in murmured conversation, after all, and also he doesn't feel like piping up is a sin that might earn him a lethal glare from his father and a disappointed side-glance from his mother – and the table is not as fearsomely wide.

The delicious main course gives way to an exquisite dessert, which then leads to wine.

The wine, Draco muses as he swirls it around in his glass, is better than the Manor wine. His father was more of a whisky drinker – both of the magical and the non-magical variety – while Draco still believes that his mother, despite pretensions of knowing her Cidre Dupont Réserve, her Champagne and the sherries, still loved sweet butterbeer most of all. There was wine in all shades and from all countries in the Manor cellars, surely, but the wine in his hand is surely nicer than any he ever sampled from the Manor catacombs.

Or maybe it is just the company sweetening the taste.

Layla delicately sips on her own wine, looking at him all the while. "Do I make you uncomfortable?" she suddenly breaks the silence.

"Not exactly," he answers as truthfully as he can and tries not to squirm in his chair.  
"Good," she nods. "Studying you will be easier this way."

She makes it sound like he is a model that she wants to draw. And indeed, he does feel naked under her gaze.

"As if there were much left to study for you," he sighs and fiddles with his bow tie just to make sure it's still there.

"My knowledge of you is very limited yet," she says. Oddly, she sounds content, which makes Draco suspect that it's a lie. And not just that, not just that she knows quite a bit more than what she allegedly does. It seems to him that she actually knows it all. But she states, "I merely know the basics," with a vague motion of her wrist into his direction.

"You knew I was a Slytherin." He remembers her off-handedly mentioning it earlier in the shop.

"Don't be silly now, Draco. You still are and always will be a Slytherin, and it's as obvious as the aristocratic nose in the middle of your face. What else would you possibly be? A Ravenclaw, maybe. Then again, you are not nearly tedious enough."

"You mean, you haven't made inquiries before meeting me?" he needles on.

She clicks her tongue. "Oh, of course I have."

The way she says it somehow makes it okay. He cannot manage to feel uncomfortable knowing that the person across from him had already learned everything there was to learn about him. It is just her brand of professionalism, he reasons. And part of her character. Omniscience suits her persona the same way her name does.

"And did you find anything particularly interesting?" he ventures after he has digested the idea, then offers, "Edifying?" And finally, "Revolting?"

Layla sips on her wine again and plays with the rim of the glass with her fingertip. Draco tries hard not to be distracted. "Nothing particular," she finally replies after an ominous pause. "The usual."

"Then you haven't inquired very thoroughly, it seems," he says. It is meant as a quip, yet it sounds heavy and dark for some reason. He immediately regrets having said it at all.

"Well, I never! Is that doubt in my professionalism that I hear, Mr Malfoy?" Layla asks, exaggeratedly saucer-eyed and with a tone of voice that somehow manages to drag the conversation back into more light-hearted zones. "I would have hoped my evening performance had you completely convinced that I am the very epitome of dedication and meticulousness."

"I could never call either into question," he gratefully accepts the helping hand to haul him away from the dark memories. "However, about that professionalism you've mentioned – I'd like to point out that you _are_ currently sitting across from your patient in a tasteful yet plunging dress and consuming alcoholic beverages."

"Ah, ah. You are merely a _potential_ _customer_, and not my patient yet," she says and wags an index finger at him. "At least not officially." There is a short pause, and then she says, "You'll have to sign the papers first."

He reaches for his glass again, never taking his eyes off of her which is way too easy a task, trying to figure out if she is serious or not. No one he has ever encountered before was this hard to take measure of.

She mimics his movements and looks back at him for a long moment before saying, "To be honest, I was convinced you'd withdraw the very second I mention that."

"Really?" he asks and keeps his expression carefully blank.

"Really." She folds her hands in her lap. Suddenly it is easy to imagine her as a counsellor sitting in a chair near the head of one of those brown psychotherapy-couches he had seen on his way from the back door to the shop.

Disconcertingly, Draco can just as easily imagine himself lying on that couch next to her chair.

"You are the most cautious person I've ever met, Mr Malfoy," Layla notes and he tries not to feel strangely snubbed by the use of his last name. "And for good reasons, too. Someone with your family history and your fortune has to be cautious. You have experienced this world, and it is not kind to the unwary, to say the least. It is not kind to such people who would readily sign their names on rolls of parchment that grant other people access into the very core of their minds. This requires a- let us call it _trust_ that you either lost long ago, or never had in the first place."

He catches himself before acknowledging that, in his case, it was most certainly the latter. The delectable food, the wine, the late hour, the company – a heady mixture. It thrills his blood and loosens his tongue more than he is strictly in agreement with. So instead of saying anything, he straightens his perfectly straight cuffs because it gives him something to do.

"And yet you didn't object to the implication that I will require you to do exactly that in the near future. Something you obviously weren't aware of."

"Obviously?" He lifts his eyebrows. That was a bit harsh. He wouldn't call himself a great enigma – that word was reserved for the likes of Severus Snape – but he had hoped to be a bit less transparent than 'obvious', even to a professional therapist.

"Carefully blank faces tend to speak volumes to me, Mr Malfoy." She gestures lazily and her bracelet tinkles again. He notices that it matches her earrings. White jade and silver. "Also, as I said, I did my homework on you. You don't frequent the circles of any of former or current clientèle, so there is no chance of you knowing our business procedures beforehand. And since there are no records of you ever calling on a counsellor's service – not to mention that you are not the type of person to have recourse to these kinds of advice – you are also not familiar with the conventions of such service. If you had been, if you had known that there was a legal commitment involved, I don't believe you would have ever considered seeking our assistance at all, and you wouldn't be sitting here with me, either. Hence I would naturally assume your ignorance."

"I see," he says after several moments of silence. Being called ignorant is hard to stomach, even if it is by a beautiful lady such as her. "Your investigation was very thorough indeed." He hadn't meant for it to sound defeated.

Layla looks almost smug. "As I said, I am a professional," she says and leans back, apparently content. "You would do well not to doubt it."

"I shall never dare to do so again," he says, nodding at her, and then at the waiter who offers to refill. Draco is ridiculously grateful for the short distraction, which gives him time to catch his breath and sort his thoughts.

When he is gone, Layla ventures once more, "So, your non-withdrawal still stands?"

"Careful now, Miss Layla. I might come to the conclusion that you are tricking me into selling my soul to the devil with my signature."

She laughs. It's a polite little laugh that makes Draco desperate to, just once, be able to make her laugh properly. Out loud, from the diaphragm. "It is only marginally less dramatic than that, Mr Malfoy. Since Mr Boothe is not the devil, he has no use whatsoever for your soul. He would be satisfied with your agreement to his terms and conditions of service. And your money, of course."  
"Of course," he echoes and takes a rather large sip from the wine. "Well then," he continues after swallowing down the delicious liquor, its rich savour blooming on his tongue, "You wouldn't happen to carry that contract around with you in that skimpy handbag of yours, would you? And a quill as well?"

Another polite laugh. It is like a piece of candy when what he really wants is a hearty meal.

Still, candy is quite wonderful, he thinks and listens to her as she changes the topic.

The evening slips by like the landscape on a train ride, from one enjoyable glass of wine and one diverting subject of conversation to the next, and midnight has long passed by when they are among the very last to leave the restaurant. It is almost deathly silent on their way back to that alley, especially since Layla has taken off her shoes to walk the distance on bare feet.

The lights are hazy. His pulse hammers madly under his collar, but his fingers are too clumsy to free himself of the bow tie.

Layla notices and lends him a hand again.

They stand almost chest to chest in that Copenhagen street devoid of people except for the two of them. In the dim street lamp light he can see her smile to herself and fix her coffee-coloured eyes on him as she works on his tie without saying a word. Briefly, the entire evening passes through his slightly drunk head and he estimates that she hasn't said much overall tonight. She has talked a lot and made him talk, but after all these hours at an arms length from her, he still barely knows a thing about her with any certainty.

It makes him a little nervous. The good kind of nervous, he thinks – hopes –, the thin veneer underneath which fascination and allure are hiding.

Breathing without the bow tie proves to be exactly as difficult as with it, and it doesn't get better until they part ways rather unceremoniously outside of the portkey station in London which, thankfully, is unstaffed at this time of night. There is no one there to see his attempt at a kiss on the cheek.

Half an hour later, when his head hits the pillow, a barefooted woman is spinning through his thoughts, slowly, slowly settling next to him on the mattress. He reaches out and runs his palm down the gentle curves of her body as it is lying on its side next to his, up and down and up and down again like ocean waves. He pulls her closer and she complies. Her ebony hair and her caramel skin smell delicious, and her lips- her coral lips that curl-

Draco falls asleep to the soft pulse of his own heartbeat as it speeds up when a warm body wraps himself around his cold one. The softness is different. The smoothness feels strange. That cryptic smile irritates him most of all.

He wishes it away and all of it changes before his eyes and under his hands until it feels right again.

When the man smiles, it is not to hide things, but to show them. To show amusement, and lust, and satisfaction. His smiles, his hands, the thoughts that ring in Draco's head, they are coherent, unanimous, they are the same.

His thoughts say _I want you._

His hands say _I want you._

His lips say _I want you. Now. Like this. And like this. And this._

Draco folds himself into his arms and is unfolded with kisses. Long, slow, thorough kisses that taste of lust on his tongue and on his lips, that wander down his chin, down his throat and his neck where they turn to possessive bites that leave marks like signatures of ownership. Draco grasps for purchase and finds it on smooth, hot, sweat-slick skin and muscles and in thick, dark hair and finally in bright eyes that bore into his. Eyes that penetrate him in yet another way as he is penetrated, completed, filled to capacity over and over and over-

Everything, everything screams _I want you. I can see you, all of you, so beautiful, I want you, I want you. _

He climaxes with a strangled cry and wakes himself up with it. The aftershocks of his orgasm leave him confused and empty. His hands itch for a strong body to cling to, but the wakefulness quickly makes that knowledge fade like stars when the sun rises to outshine them, and his hands forget what they need, so all he is left with is a nameless desire.

The sense of urgency to make it all stop, whatever 'it' is, and somehow regain control over himself, his body and his mind, are interwoven with a deep, wretched fear that claws at his insides. For a long moment, Draco is certain that he is going mad.

Like his father. Like his mother. Maybe it runs in the family. In the blood.

Draco sends a letter expressing his wish to enter a contract with Boothe's establishment and makes an appointment for the day after even before having breakfast.

/

Layla's script is as elegant as she is. Her letter reaches him at work. _Very well_, _Mr Malfoy, _her response reads in a neat hand._ Please make sure to bring your wand in order to complete the signing of the agreement_.

He does. He enters the shop through the front door, five minutes before closing. Layla is there to welcome him and does so without the faintest hint of the night before last. He both admires and hates her professionalism. He is relieved, and he is worried.

She leads him to one of countless rooms in the back which is completely white and houses nothing but a table and a chair. No couch, to his relief. For now.

The signing takes ten minutes. He doesn't really read the paragraphs, his brain refuses to cooperate and take any of it in, so he just stares and lets his eyes wander from left to right in an approximation of reading. He even catches a few words, like one might catch swirling snowflakes. He just hopes that it isn't too obvious.

After what feels like an adequate amount of time, he looks up hesitatingly, almost afraid of meeting Layla's doubtlessly knowing look. But she is absorbed in a slim volume of Italian poetry and doesn't look up until he puts the quill back into its little silver sheath, its tip moist and pitch black.

"Ah. Very well. While the ink is drying, we can proceed to the oath."

The spell is quick and straightforward and invisible. As Layla murmurs the incantation, he feels like he has swallowed a smooth, hot stone. It feels heavy and unyielding in his stomach but also warms him to the tips of his toes. The warm feeling fades immediately when Layla stops and lets go of the tip of his wand which she had been holding, but the stone stays firmly lodged, heavy and solid right beneath his navel.

"Good. This means we have an agreement, Mr Malfoy. We will commence your sessions next week's Thursday at quarter to eight in the evening."

She doesn't wait for his reply. The contract rolls itself up, its tassels tying themselves in a decorative knot, and flies into her hand. She takes it, the quill and the inkwell with her as she leaves him sitting in that room without a goodbye. Without a trace of whatever it was that he had thought they had shared in Copenhagen, even now, now that the business part should be over. He bites back the disappointment at her coldness and tries to quell ideas of her having been brainwashed or obliviated or replaced by someone else via Polyjuice Potion.

Closing his eyes, he also fights off a distinct echo of her voice ringing out in his head, going '_grant other people access into the very core of their minds_' over and over. He tells himself that, while it might feel like a mistake right now, it was the only right choice he could have made. As if to prove his point, a mighty yawn forces itself on him, and he gets up and leaves the shop to apparate home as quickly as possible.

He meets Astoria in the corridor on his way to his rooms. She smiles mildly at him and, without saying anything at all, lets him know that the information has been passed down the chain in a right hurry, from Layla to Plutus, to his son Martin, to Martin's girlfriend Daphne, and finally from Daphne to her sister.

This evening, it takes him quite a while to fall asleep even though he is dead tired. The heavy feeling in his belly is keeping him awake, and so is his head.

The other side of the night he spends without any doubts or questions in a warm embrace.

/ **TBC**

_For the curious: The Noma restaurant actually exists and, for the past few years, has been ranked Best Restaurant in the World by the Guide Michelin. Needless to say, I've never been there because I don't have a hen that lays solid gold eggs. Sadly, I haven't even been to Copenhagen. I've been told that it is a beautiful little/big city, though.  
_


	6. Chapter 5

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Thanks to BadGirl for a lone and much appreciated review and to Jasper Noir and pottergal23 for fav'ing and/or following. And thanks to _you_, anonymous reader-who-only-shows-up-in-my-story-stats. There's about 15 of you, and you should know I appreciate you as well._

_I'm sorry that this story is so wordy and that the (slash-less and largely Potter-less) back story is somewhat long-winded. I promise to improve. For now, I'm afraid we'll keep travelling further back through one Draco Malfoy's past..._

/

**-/Chapter 5/-**

/

Draco remembers the last time he staggered home like this, down the gravel driveway that leads from the gates in the wall demarcating the Malfoy property down to the house. He had been very drunk, but not as drunk as Pansy who had been practically dangling off his shoulder like quarry. Back then, just like now, he had wondered why on earth they even had a driveway, seeing that no Malfoy in the history of ever had ever owned or driven a car.

He had celebrated the second year anniversary of the You-Know-Whose ruin with Pansy, Blaise, Gregory and Milicent, or, as Pansy called it, the Anniversary Of The End Of Our Collective Futures. It was long ago indeed. In another life.

Incidentally, it was also the first anniversary of his parents' double suicide.

Maybe, he remembered conjecturing, maybe they had marked the day together the year before as well, just like him and Pansy and the crew. Maybe they had gone out and got a drink or three and reminisced.

Draco imagined how his parents might have seen people with colourful wigs or Auror and Death Eater costumes and Dumbledore beards or skimpy party dresses and butterbeer helmets running down Diagon Alley, ten sheets to the wind when it wasn't even two p.m., drowning their sad recollections in alcohol until they could forget that all the people who had died during the war weren't there any more.

It might well be that, upon seeing their fellow wizards and witches in this state of inebriation and hysteric melancholia, Lucius and Narcissa had decided that this world was not one they could possibly stay in. Whatever their healers and advisers and lawyers, the few friends they still had, even their own son had said, this world would never stop being peculiar, preposterous – perverted, even. It was intolerable in its entirety and they couldn't bear to be a part of it. So they had bid it farewell that very same day, together.

Drunk as Draco had been that day, heaving himself and a surprisingly heavy Pansy home around quarter to five a.m., it had even made sense, in his head. At least it was some semblance of an explanation for why they had- done it. Even a bad explanation is better than nothing, after all.

Pansy, after emptying her stomach twice by the wayside and once in the guest toilet, had got the idea in her silly head to come on to him. She had made the mistake of sneaking up on him while he was taking a shower. His elbow, jerking of its own volition at the unexpected intruder, had landed square in her face, and she had ended up bleeding profusely onto the bathroom floor and reflexively retching up the last traces of undigested matter that her stomach was willing to give. Her partial nakedness – bra and socks but no panties – had completed the picture. St Mungo's had diagnosed a broken nose and refused to interfere too much with the healing of the resulting black eye on the account of all the alcohol in her system. And maybe a little because she fucking deserved it and everyone – futilely – hoped for some sort of a learning effect.

He likes to remember the day not as the second Anniversary Of The End Of something or another, nor as the first anniversary of his parents' departure, and neither as the day before a morning on which he had to endure a headache so epic that no potion or charm could cure it. Rather, he commemorates it as the day which had seen him part ways with Pansy Parkinson. Permanently. Upon reflection, he had never really liked her. At all.

Strangely, as he is thinking of this day long ago, he almost wishes for someone to cling to his shoulder and be more wretched than he is. Even if it had to be Pansy. It would make his wretchedness seem more manageable.

He has just found out that Layla is a woman of a thousand abilities. Besides knowing her wines and her seafood, being well-versed in the poetry of Ingolfr the Iambic, Percival Pratt and Christopher Marlowe, speaking at least six languages fluently, being able to walk in five inch high heels and read his face and posture like a book, Layla has turned out to be a terrifically gifted Legilimens. During their 'session' – the first one, to diagnose him, as she had previously explained – she had often reminded him of Lucius, in both senses of the word.

She seemed confident that the source of his sleeplessness, which in turn is the reason for his chronic fatigue, are unresolved parental issues that have been triggered and boosted to a pathological level by Scorpius' departure for Hogwarts. "Your father left you, and you had to let your son go. Scorpius' leaving is a mirroring of what happened with your parents, and you probably had no chance for processing the first time, so naturally, your subconscious is replaying all these emotions although it still doesn't know how to handle them."

Her voice had been like a bright, clean buoy on a raging sea of muck and ugly memories. Horrifically ugly memories.

She insisted that they all have to be ploughed up so he could deal with them consciously, but she didn't disclose how he is supposed to do that, and he couldn't ask. Not her, not anyone.

Even though she had given him a fairly potent calming drought and made him sit through a piping hot cup of very good tea, after she dismissed him those memories are still there, churning all at once, a pit full of maggots. The war and the aftermath. The fear. The despair. The pain and grief. The self-loathing, most of all. The faces of his parents – when he was younger, he never realized how his mother got paler and thinner every time he came home from Hogwarts, but now he does. Voldemort, Dumbledore, Snape, his aunt with the mad eyes and Fenrir Greyback, and Potter, and Crabbe and Goyle, and Astoria, and then his son looking up to him with bright blue eyes because he _doesn't know_. He just doesn't know any of it, and Draco hopes he will never, ever know, but that hope is so slim. It leaves so much room for fear that he will. _He will know, one day, _that fear whispers sickeningly. Draco doesn't know what to do against it, or how to stop it. He tried pressing his hands over his ears, but to no avail.

The feelings had got in the way of his apparition and messed with his aim, leaving him to walk the two kilometres from the outer gates to the manor house, through the chilly December rain with his heart hurting and his stomach clenched painfully as if it were trying to digest the poison along with his mind.

He is soaked to his underwear when he enters through the back door at the winter garden which is usually open. On his way to the staircase, he becomes aware of an agitated conversation, muffled by walls, doors and the distance, so he turns left instead of going upstairs and follows the sounds into the kitchen. The voices belong to Astoria and Daphne, so much is clear, but he cannot discern what they are saying until he is almost in the room.

"-can't know that. What if-" Astoria pleads, thin-voiced.

"Tory, it was _your_ idea as well," Daphne flares, almost shouting that 'your', "we went over it several times, nothing but a resounding _Yes_ was heard from you, now how did you manage to suddenly convince yourself-"

Her younger sister starts talking loudly until she falls silent.

"Yes, I know, I _know_, but I was thinking and, I mean, even if the legal aspects turned out in my favour, how would I really know how he decides? I cannot know that I –"

"Tory, we've been through this. Everything has been planned. You can't turn back now, what would I tell Martin?"

"But Daphne, I really don't think I would want to risk my-"

"Draco!" Daphne suddenly exclaims, grinding the altercation to an instantaneous halt.

Astoria wheels around to find him standing in the doorway and gasps, "Draco, you're back already! That was- That was quick and unexpected." Which makes no sense to him, seeing that he is terrifically _late_ rather than early, but he lets it slide.

All of a sudden he wants to walk up to her and embrace her, have her comb his hair with her fingers like she did that one time long ago when his hair was still long, and the two of them only had one bedroom they shared, and they didn't yet follow the same patterns for polite and meaningless conversation over and over again like they do now. At least he doesn't think they did.

He wants to tell her sorry about Copenhagen. He wants to tell her that he's sorry he wasn't home even earlier than this, because he could have been if he hadn't botched his apparition so badly. He wants to tell her that she shouldn't reckon that he'd be in session for longer than half an hour or so each time, because there is just no way, no way at all that he could take more than that. He yearns to tell her that this step he has taken this evening is a step towards normalcy, something he strives towards on her behalf as well. And on Scorpius' behalf. Whatever the word means, he suddenly needs her to know that he is trying to 'get things back to normal', as they say.

Daphne and Astoria stare at him. He doesn't know how long they have been doing so, waiting for him to say something. Anything.

"I will withdraw, then," he informs them tonelessly and leaves Astoria standing there with her unspoken 'How was it?' doubtlessly burning under her fingernails.

From within his bedroom, he has Milly fetch him a bottle of Firewhiskey which he empties steadily over twenty minutes without tasting or feeling much of it at all before it knocks him out all at once. He falls into a comatose stupor with the bottle in hand, fully clothed, on his sofa.

Hitting rock-bottom, he finds out the next morning, is not half as character-building or enlightening as they make it out to be in the books and the films. Also, no one has ever told him that, although the idea of a hit, a sudden strike or blow – a rapid and momentary contact – is involved in this figure of speech, hitting rock bottom was a state that could actually last quite a while.

Sometimes it can last months.

Also, he discovers that rock bottom doesn't actually exist at all. Storytellers made it up, too. It is always possible to go even lower, much lower than before.

/ **TBC**


	7. Chapter 6

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama.

/

_Things are about to get complicated._

_Thank you for reading, anonymous reader!_

/

**-/Chapter 6/-**

/

"We haven't," he answers readily, despite the fact that the question was outrageous. It helps that he is slightly drugged and generally relaxed, dangling somewhere between waking and sleeping on his favourite couch. He doesn't remember why he dreaded the piece of furniture before, as it is endlessly comfortable. Like a cool, smooth hug that faintly smells of sweat.

Even without the potion and the mild hypnosis, he would have told Layla everything she wants to know about his conjugal life. She already knows anyway. This being the case, he isn't sure why she is asking all this again, but he can't muster the energy to seriously scrutinise her motives.

She asks about Astoria quite a lot, especially since the Christmas dinner. Scorpius, uncharacteristically critical of both his parents' behaviour now that he has been separated from them and become part of another stratum of society, questioned his mother about her habit of not letting Draco take part in the letters he sent to her.

"I get that you're not like Shrew's parents and everything, but could you please just share my mail? I don't have time to write two letters all the time," he said to Astoria, in a manner that was too grave for a boy of just eleven. Astoria had no choice but to smile, nod and tightly respond "Of course, dear."

Although Draco would profit from the new rule, he is almost saddened by the fact that his son had turned from a child into a grown-up after mere four months at Hogwarts. From his innocent, light-hearted, eternally giggly Peter Pan, he has changed into a worldly-wise and wary adolescent. Someone who understands that most everyone else's parents are as affectionate as Angela and Eustace Shrewsbury, while his own parents are more like strangers – opponents, even – who happen to live together in a huge house and can't manage to cease their jealous treasuring up of their son's correspondence.

Draco has told her about that dinner and his feelings about it twice. In detail. He grew sad about it both times and ended up visiting his parents' spirit cabinet after both sessions.

Sometimes he thinks that Layla already knows more about the Malfoy marriage than Astoria herself. Perhaps more than he himself as well, since she can analyse from the outside while he is stuck in the middle of it.

She certainly knows more about his finances than Astoria ever knew. To "rule out the financial as a factor interfering with your mental well-being", she had him disclose most all of his accounts and talk about the expenses of his shop. Astoria has never been interested in any of it, neither in the monetary part, nor in the potions or the business in general. In his eight years and five months of owning the store, she has been there three times. Seeing that he has never actually made much of a profit and then started slowly accumulating deficit for the past four years, he is somewhat glad about her ignorance. It would just upset her needlessly.

Once they had established that, while he was having trouble – especially of the Ministry kind – at the shop, he isn't very concerned about money as such, they moved on from the topic and haven't touched it again since.

They keep coming back to sex, though. Which even his peacefully sleepy self finds a little disconcerting. Despite the fact that Layla had otherwise figured out absolutely everything about him and had taken all of it in without judgement or so much as batting a shadowed eyelid, he feels no inclination to share with her too much of what is going on with him almost every night and morning. With some mortification he remembers mentioning his recurring nocturnal penile tumescence once, but she hadn't remarked on it whatsoever.

Two stealthy visitations to Muggle book stores' self help sections had taught him that, apparently, most men go through that every single day of their lives. Frustratingly, the books always described the phenomenon in strictly physical terms and never said if actual ejaculation and arousal are a normal part of the deal for a man in his mid-thirties.

After all the embarrassment he has gone through, every hurdle he has leapt, he fears that this last one might be too high, that it might undo him.

He can't help but think that Layla knows, and that she is driving him towards that hurdle gleefully.  
"Do you feel dissatisfied by this state of affairs?" she follows up his answer. As usual, she is a disembodied voice floating somewhere near his head. During that trip to the Muggle book store, he has also read that this technique requires complete lack of emotion from the enquirer, but most of the time, he can hear her slight smile. He can definitely hear it now.

"A little," he answers. A very little, actually. He cannot remember the last time he has looked at Astoria with anything approximating lust. He assumes that it must have been before Scorpius was conceived.

"Do you feel sexually dissatisfied in general?"

He would really like to see her face, but he keeps his eyes half-closed and unfocussed as they are.

"Not really," he answers vaguely, and she challenges his answer just like he knew she would.

"Please clarify."

_I have a memory of you putting on a dress-_

_Every morning, my body- my hands-_

"I am married, I have a son, and I am thirty-seven years old. I would...", he trails off and yawns. The relaxation is deeper than normal and makes it hard to hold a coherent string of thoughts in his head, let alone vocalize it. "I would assume that- any sexual dissatisfaction stems from expectations which men of my age and social status really shouldn't have, so-" He trails off and can't help but think that Eustace Shrewsbury is five or six years his senior and he and his wife probably still...

"So you believe that deprivation is the natural situation," Layla clarifies.

"It's not deprivation," he insists but doesn't want to elaborate. Nobody is _taking_ anything away from him. He is not really lacking anything, either, especially not anything that is rightfully his. "It's just how it is." It sounds lame.

"How about your wife?"

Suddenly he is catapulted several months into the past, to a night in Copenhagen when she mentioned Astoria and it had irritated him just like it does now.

"What about her?" he retorts. The break from etiquette – he is supposed to say 'Please clarify' as well to help him stay in the zone – earns him a stare which he can feel on his scalp, as well as several seconds of punitive silence.

"Do you believe that she also accepts the circumstances?" Layla finally asks with an emphasis on the last word.

"I wouldn't know. I think so. She has never complained, if that is what you mean."

"Did she or does she have extramarital intercourse?"

"Why would you ask such a question?" He fully opens his eyes and frowns at the blindingly white ceiling. It's not so much the implication that makes him angry, but being asked itself.

"It is only a question, Mr Malfoy." Layla recrosses her legs. Draco can hear the swish of skin and fabric against one another, and the soft click of the heel of her shoe on the floor. "Please answer the question."

"I don't think she did or does have extramarital intercourse," he complies with gritted teeth and wilfully omits the fact that she has had five or six dates – professional dinners, she calls them, arranged by her father for his business – in the past five years or so, with gentlemen from all over the world, and that, for some of them with their strange cultures, extramarital intercourse might well be some form of second dessert.

"Did you have extramarital intercourse at any point in the past?"

Her voice is so passionless that it makes him angry.

"No," he replies and feels a hard knot in his stomach.

"Did you ever consider it?"

"Certainly," he hears himself saying.

"With me?"

"Naturally," he answers immediately.

"Do you still?"

"Occasionally," he says.

"Right now?" Her voice is so near.

He wakes with a gasp and looks around, disoriented. The sofa clings to him uncomfortably as he sits up, the peeling sound sets his teeth on edge. His stomach hurts as if he had swallowed a brick.

"You drifted off for half an hour," Layla says. She is standing in the doorway, a dainty white china cup of hot beverage – jasmine tea by the smell of it – in one hand and a saucer in the other. "Would you like some tea as well?"

"Wh- I. No, thanks. When did-" He wipes his face with a sweaty palm that smells just like the couch leather. "What was the last thing I said?"

"'It's just how it is', I believe." She cocks her head. "Do you feel prepared to continue?"

He searches her face, but finds nothing in it, as usual. "Yes," he eventually says, against his actual feeling and without knowing exactly why he answered in the affirmative.

She just nods. "Only half an hour longer tonight should be sufficient. Please lie back down, Draco."

With the memory of that worryingly vivid dream still at the forefront of his brain, it becomes strangely conspicuous that she doesn't often call him by his first name any more these days. It occurs to him that he desperately wants to become something more than Mr Malfoy to her, but he doesn't know how.

Or why, for that matter.

He goes home half an hour later with a tightness in his stomach that doesn't go away until the next morning, when it has been kissed and caressed away by someone who has never called him anything but his first name.

/

/

"That sounds vaguely illegal," Potter comments on his – admittedly fragmentary – recounting of events. He figures that Potter doesn't need to know every last sordid detail. It is difficult enough to tell him the bare minimum already.

"It is, and it isn't," Draco says, blinks and wipes his eyes. It is suddenly hard to focus, the world is blurry. He misses his cup when he tries to grab it but quickly masks the failed attempt. Potter doesn't notice, he is taking the last sip from his own beverage. The way he tips the glass all the way back exposes his throat. Draco tries his hardest not to stare at his Adam's apple moving up and down but ends up failing at that, too. He only averts his eyes at the very last moment before Potter puts the glass back down again.

"Compared to the Muggles, we're amateurs when it comes to managing mental health care," he says and it sounds like he had rehearsed the line several times before. And so does the next line, and the next.

"Well. I've certainly never thought about any of that," Potter admits, and Draco finds that he has been elaborating his point for a good two minutes.

"So they know about your money, and your family, and your wedded life now. In great detail." Potter sums his recount up with a slight air of impatience. "You clicked 'Yes, I have read and agreed to the terms and conditions' without actually reading them, and disclosed just about everything to your counsellor, both of which is standard procedure I guess, even though the methods are admittedly a bit shady." He crosses his arms. "Now. Where do I come into the story?"

_Where _don't _you?_ Draco almost asks._ You've been the protagonist the entire time._

He takes a deep breath for the last parts of his narration, prepared for the pain that comes with scratching wounds that are still festering.

/ **TBC**


	8. Chapter 7

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Some naughty bits up ahead... Actually, this is my favourite naughty bit. I enjoyed writing it to an unreasonable degree. I hope you'll like it, too._

/

**-/Chapter 7/-**

/

"It has been almost half a year now," Layla begins the session.

There is a box on the side table. It is dark carnelian, intricately carved and lacquered, and there is no visible lock, latch or hinge. When Layla put it there with supreme caution, the sound it made was dull and heavy.

"I'm afraid we haven't made much headway in terms of curing you of your fatigue since we started."

Draco merely nods. Indeed, nothing much has changed in all those months. Except that he sometimes thinks that he might have been better off without this therapy which, so far, has done nothing but pulling the skeletons from his closets and making them dance. And which keeps him closely tied to this woman who is beautiful, and also cold, unknown and out of reach like the moon.

Not to mention that it has cost him long hours of his life and some several hundreds of galleons. He has paid for every second of Layla's quizzes, every potion administered, every talisman, mojo, charm and amulet given to him to invigorate his waking hours or soothe his sleep to provide short-term relief or recall certain long-lost memories, pictures or feelings, every séance, every stick of incense, every candle and hundreds of cups of tea.

And just about every morning he wakes up with a raging erection or stained sheets, unsettled by that obscure need for _something_ which sits deep within him like a thorn, and that feeling of lack, of want and dearth accompanies him wherever he goes, incorporeal like a fog but _there_, just like his tiredness, wafting through his brain and throughout his body that feels so heavy and old.

What is worst about an illness, he has read in someone's biography once, is when nobody can really tell you what you are suffering from, or if it will ever get better, or if it will even get worse. That phase in which you don't know if you are flying or falling. He isn't sure about the metaphor, but he knows he has been stuck in that phase for months now.

"I was resolved to not use this particular method until it is virtually the last option. I know that it is opposed to your nature as a cautious man, but I have also come to believe that you are pragmatic and practical in nature, therefore I would like to propose it."

True to his pragmatic and practical nature – other words for desperation – he goes home with the box which really is leaden and puts it under his bed, right underneath his pillow, with the little hole in the middle of the carved-in dream-catcher pointing upwards just like Layla has explained. He instructs Milly not to clean or otherwise move it, and the house-elf eyes the shadowy cube – called a morpheusphere, despite its cubicity – with a slight wariness, but nods dutifully.

It is almost comforting to know that they have finally pushed forward to what he feels is the root of the problem. His sleep – the contents of his sleep, that is, something which Layla had tried to discuss with him several times but couldn't because he truly doesn't remember a thing – will seep into that box. Like a pensieve for dreams, Layla has explained, his nocturnal thoughts will be caught and held inside. The following week, he would have to take the box back to the shop, where the complicated extraction of the wispy traces of his dreams is already being prepared so that he might finally have a look at them. For once, there is some sense of direction and purpose to what he is doing.

With that, sleep comes easy to him.

When he wakes up the next morning, sticky and bathed in sweat, that easiness is gone and replaced by trepidation. He suddenly knows that it was all a big mistake and berates himself for not comprehending it earlier, for pouncing on this foolish idea like he had.

The other six nights he sleeps on the sofa. He has made up several excuses to explain.

Despite only containing one nights worth of dreams, the box feels significantly heavier when he hands it back next Thursday at quarter to eight.

"The developing will take some time. I will let you know when there are any results to be shared, then we will schedule another meeting right away to have a look together." As always, she doesn't ask for his agreement or wait for objections and just decides and declares.

Layla vanishes with the cubic sphere, taking it to some hidden place in the shop, and comes back ten minutes later with two cups of tea and a little incense to help him slip into the peaceful state. This evening, he doesn't manage to get there – which annoys him, especially since Layla likens it to a little child that cannot sleep before Christmas morning – so they cut the session short.

He comes home to a drawing room full of people he has never seen. Four people, that is, two witches, two wizards, who are sitting in his chairs around his table and are talking to each other in politely hushed tones until they become aware of him and fall silent as one.

Then, they stare.

"Draco, I hadn't expected you to be back so early," Astoria says as she enters the room as well from the kitchen side, a large plate of cheese nibbles in hand.

"What's going on?" he asks quietly, taking her by the upper arm and leading her out of earshot, outside the door.

These people look like Ministry minions to him, even though he doesn't know any of them personally. They don't have any badges he can see, but they wear those dark, matching clothes, and those attitudes, and those cold, bored looks that identify government people all over the world. "Is there a problem with the shop?"

Some five years ago, one gentleman from the Potion Regulations office had paid a call to them at the Manor, to tell him in a grandfatherly-yet-threatening fashion that they would shut his store down and invalidate his licence the next time he didn't abide by their regulations. Since then, he has followed government instructions meticulously, but they are just so overwhelmingly numerous nowadays, and he feared that, in his current, absent-minded state, he might have missed one or two. Also, there still was that whole business with Theodore Nott and this Mickey Finn, which he thought was long settled, but the Ministry could always-

"No, no. Draco, these people are here for me... and for Daphne. It's, uhm, about a Greengrass issue." She touches his elbow lightly and he doesn't pull away until she says, "They're legal counsellors. It's- It doesn't really concern you-"

"Legal counsellors? What do you need legal counsellors for?" He is briefly afraid that someone from her side of the family has died or something equally tragic and he didn't even know because he has been so very self-absorbed these past months.

"I'll tell you later, all right? Please, Draco, can you give us some privacy for another hour or two?"

He looks over to the open door and sees one of the women looking back at him. Her gaze is piercing and hard as granite. "Sure," he says, tearing his eyes off that murderous stare with an effort, and repeats, "Yes, sure I will. I'll be- upstairs."

He waits for her to come and explain like she said she would, but when he asks Milly around half past one as to Astoria's whereabouts, the elf says that the mistress has retreated to her rooms several hours before.

The following morning, instead of his wife he finds a falcon at the breakfast table, with a note attached to his leg addressed to him. Layla writes that she would like to meet with him as soon as possible. Something about the wording gives him a sinking feeling, and he quickly apparates to work, where he assigns Magnus to take care of the shop for him, before heading straight to Boothe's business in Knockturn Alley. There are no customers in yet, except for a cleaning elf that gives him a bored look as it dusts off the merchandise.

He waits near the counter and glances over at the _Staff Only_ door every other second, unsure as to whether he is allowed to just enter by now, seeing that he is not exactly a regular customer, and hasn't been for months.

Before he can follow through, however, the door swings open and Plutus steps through. Layla is right behind him.

"Draco!" Boothe exclaims and charges at him with an outstretched hand. He is still using the same cologne, and it is still hard to bear. "Long time no see, but Layla has kept me in the loop, I can tell you."

He darts a glance at her, trying to find out if 'keeping the boss in the loop' means what he dreads it means but she doesn't meet his eye at all. "Good morning, Mr Boothe. I received mail from Miss Na'amah."

"Ah, yes, yes. About the morpheusphere. Come to the lab with us really quick," Plutus motions him to step through the forbidden door and to the right, into a large, sunlit room that looks faintly like a kitchen.

The box that had been sleeping under his bed for a week is sitting on the table in the middle. The outer box has been opened so that it looks like a modern art rendition of a flower, with four large, teardrop-shaped petals alternating with four smaller, pointy ones. In the middle of it, a shiny globe is nestled. It is about as big as a tennis ball, made of a flawless white stone, possibly jade or white opal.

"As you can see, we dismantled the sphere in order to reach into the core, where the, to not get too technical, the effluvia of the dreams are caught. I assure you that Miss Na'amah is one of the most experienced handlers and extractors in all of Europe, she has dealt with these objects several times and there has never been a complication."

"So you're- you're saying that there was a complication this time?" He says it more to Layla than to Plutus, but Plutus is the one who answers while his associate still doesn't meet his eye.

"Well, simply said, the sphere was broken. We don't think that you broke it, so don't worry, we're not holding you liable for the damage, but, needless to say, you will have to repeat the procedure."

"Broken?" he asks, stepping closer to the table.

"There is a small chip in the sphere," Layla points out blankly. He nods in reply and 'hm-hm's, even though he cannot see any fault whatsoever in the stone. Neither the manager nor his counsellor are willing to give up any more details, and both seem oddly in a hurry. Plutus walks over to a cabinet and gets out the broken morpheusphere's identical twin.

"So if you would be so kind as to take this one..." Draco does as he is bidden, surprised once more by the weight of something so small and, now that he has seen the inner workings, largely empty.  
He apparates home with the second box and puts it under the bed just like its predecessor, then reminds Milly once more to not clean or otherwise touch the thing, just to be sure.

All day long, a nagging feeling of worry follows him, even more diffuse and undefined than the other one. At work, business is very slow. Around twelve, he even sends Magnus home because there isn't anything to do.

Making a potion he has made hundreds of times without interruption gives him time to think about all those flitting shadows in his life, evasive, impossible to directly confront. First the unsettling condition induced by whatever his body is doing at night, then that idea about Potter – he had almost forgotten, but brewing a potion brings back old memories of Severus' dungeon classrooms and drags along the memory of last year's 1st of September at King's Cross 9¾, sharp like a razor –, then his wife's ominous visitors yesterday evening whose presence was far from explained, now the disquieting performance this morning. That hard line around Layla's mouth and the averted eyes.

Gloomily, he turns the front door sign around at quarter past two and decides to take a nap on the folding cot in the back room because his head is throbbing and his eyes are tired. The lavender fumes from his latest batch of potions have filled the air and make him drowsy. Determined to not really sleep at all, he closes his eyes, listens to the deep tick-tock of his wall clock, the steady bubbling of his potions, the occasional scrit-scrit from inside the ingredient glasses.

As the past events sluggishly roll through his mind like molasses, he realizes that he cannot move. Not that he is not able to, but he isn't allowed. He doesn't allow himself to. It is a taxing task, but simple. All he has to do is breathe and feel.

The tip of the feather wanders upwards over his still, bare body, from his middle where his arousal is already obvious, up his stomach and up along his breastbone and his left clavicle, further to the nape of his neck. And slowly downwards again, circling his nipples once, down his side where he is awfully ticklish, to his hip. And the other way again.

_I want to eat you.  
_  
Draco tries not to react, tries to keep the heat contained in his body. It is almost unbearably hot now, like a live wire coiled in his stomach.

_I will start with your thighs.  
_  
Gone is the feather. Two large, strong hands grab his left thigh tightly and massage it, as if crawling upwards from his knee to his pelvis. Then, just before they reach the spot, the other leg. The silky sound of palms against his skin and the man's breathing are the only noises in the world.

_Then your flanks.  
_  
When he scatters open-mouthed kisses around his navel, it takes all the power Draco has for him not to laugh and curl up. The man's lips feel hot, his breath like a branding iron.

_And your wings.  
_  
Draco bites the inside of his cheek as the man starts to lick the tender skin on the inside of his wrist, then the crook of his elbow, then his bicep, then his armpit and his shoulder. A sigh wrangles free and escapes Draco's mouth. The man catches it with his own and thrusts his tongue into him, not caring that there is no active response. Indeed, the passiveness only seems to spurn him on, as if it were a challenge and an insult against him. He slides on top of Draco, to make him feel his weight, and possibly to rub their erect manhoods together to coax a reaction out of him.

Draco swallows the sweet saliva and curls his toes and does not cave in. The heaviness on him feels oddly wonderful.

_Your haunches last.  
_  
He reaches down and pulls up Draco's knee to expose his buttock and sinks his fingers into his skin. Like a lion's teeth sink into its prey.

Except that Draco wants to be preyed. He is the real predator this time, and by just lying and waiting, he has ensnared his own prey. He has positioned it between his legs. _Perfect.  
_  
Draco stirs, brings up the other leg as well and interlocks his feet behind the man's lower back, so that they circle his hip. So that he has him fixed as if his legs were talons.

"What if-", he breathes, nudges him gently with his shoulders and his nose, until his ear is close to his mouth, so he can whisper into it.

"What if I ate _you_?" he asks and grips him so powerfully with his thighs that it must hurt his midriff. He nuzzles the tender spot beneath his earlobe, then changes his mind and bites it instead, pulls at it with his teeth.

The tremor that runs through the body in his grasp is immensely satisfying. Draco sucks the spot until it is red.

The man turns his head so they are eye to eye and nose to nose, with hardly enough space for breath between their mouths.

"It might give me your strength," Draco whispers with stinging lips. _I need your strength._

There is a dangerous flicker in those eyes which is all the warning Draco gets. The man bridges the short distance and kisses him until there is no air, until it is more of a fight than a kiss, but with only winners. He burrows his hand in Draco's hair, and Draco pulls him close by his neck because he knows that trying to push him away would be futile. He rocks his hips against him and almost comes undone by the feelings this elicits and by the noises he manages to wrest from the man.

"Ungh, gods, Draco. Draco, don't stop," he presses and throws his head back with a groan. Draco complies readily, triumphal, vindicated, attacks the bared throat. They increase the pace, the friction and the intensity until the entire world feels like it has been doused in gasoline and sparkling stars are starting to rain down from the sky.

Just before they both burst into flames by the frantic movement, the man looks him in the eye once more, brow gleaming with sweat.

"If you truly were weak," he bites out between two thrusts and the honesty in his face feels like a punch to the chest and makes Draco gasp, a visceral pain deep in his body, "I wouldn't want you."

Draco wakes just before five o'clock with a tear dried on his cheek and his eyes heavy and stinging sore as if he had gotten sand into them.

There is a loud noise on the front door, an incessant knocking which Draco already guesses belongs to old Mrs Braithwait who comes every Friday evening to get a dose of tincture against her gout, or possibly the gout of her obese dachshund Rosie, or both of them – Draco doesn't know and doesn't care much. He only makes sure it would help either.

What he does know, although he doesn't know how, is that something has changed. For the first time in weeks, perhaps months, he feels a tiny bit closer to well rested. His head is awake enough to feel that he is caught up in something.

He just doesn't know what to do with it. There is no one there to help him. So he closes the shop for the week and goes home with his heart pounding.

The manor is eerily silent. For the hundredth time he wishes his son were still at home. Just to make some sounds and give it some life.

Draco calls for Milly, and she again informs him that _mistress has retreated to her rooms some time ago_. Which is unfortunate and uncharacteristic – Astoria normally never goes to bed before eleven – but much better than _mistress is meeting with ominous legal counsellors for unspecified reasons_.

When he walks up the stairs on his way to his own rooms, he notices a certain patch of wall. Or rather, he notices something that isn't on this patch of wall any more. A portrait of Astoria's maternal grandmother, dame Miranda Greengrass-Corvington, had hung there for years. Now, it is gone.

It was the one moving picture they kept not in the portrait room but in the Manor halls, because Grandma Manda had a special place in Astoria's heart, and because she was the self-proclaimed bad apple of the family, not really belonging to the rest of them even posthumously. Also, because the old lady had been deaf from birth and thus never talked much, which made her a quite wonderful magical portrait to be gently watching over their staircase, quite unlike all of Draco's grandparents, or Astoria's father's parents, for that matter.

Draco calls Milly again and asks her about the portrait's whereabouts, but she cannot answer his question and has to be told to _please not_ go smack herself with a cast-iron pan for five full minutes.

In the end, Draco just assumes that Astoria had the portrait or its frame cleaned or restored, even though he cannot remember seeing any deterioration on it. Then again, he has been out of it these past weeks especially, and he cannot remember consciously looking at dame Miranda for quite some time, either. So he lets it be and proceeds to his room.

Saturday starts with an owl from Daphne tapping against his window with its beak. A short note tells him that she and Astoria have to attend a "family gathering of some importance" in France on short notice, and that there is no way to tell how long it might take.

For the first time, Draco feels utterly alone.

/ **TBC**

_So, who's the villain here? What's going on? Any guesses before it all comes to light in the following three chapters, anyone?_


	9. Chapter 8

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Thanks to butterfly95929 for following!_

/

**-/Chapter 8/-**

/

"Where is Miss Na'amah?"

He rests one corner of the box on the counter, not quite putting it down all the way because he doesn't want to part with it or hand it over to the unknown employee, but not able to hold it up any more, either. It weighs fifteen pounds at the very least. He doesn't want to risk spelling it lighter either, since that might interfere with the precious cargo inside.

"She is on a leave of absence, Mr Malfoy. For private reasons. As I said."

The man behind the counter looks like he just peeled himself out of a women's magazine, the very epitome of the fabled 'tall, dark and handsome' man. Draco doesn't care about the latter two, but having to slightly look up at the guy's face bugs him, especially since the smugness he sees there tells him that Halsey – that's the name on his tag – doesn't take his inquiry seriously at all.

"She has made this appointment with me just this morning, so how can she not be here?" It was only Monday. The owl that had reached him while he was opening the shop had surprised him somewhat. Layla hadn't specified any reasons for antedating the extraction. Which was usual and typical, but he had counted on being filled in later on. But 'later on' has come now and she isn't here. There's no one to tell him what's going on in her stead, either.

Halsey bows slightly, hand on his lapel like a servant in the films, which makes Draco feel like an idiot. "I apologise in Miss Na'amah's name. I am sure she deeply regrets any inconvenience."

"And she only instructed you to take over the extraction for her? She didn't say exactly why she would reschedule?"

"As I said, Mr Malfoy," Halsey nods.

Draco briefly considers sending him to call the manager, but at that moment the front door opens with a tinkling sound and two people stroll in. They have the clothes, the attitude, and they look exactly like they always do when they come into his own shop, always failing to act out the part of the innocuous customer. Draco knows he simply needs to get out of this shrink shop immediately.

"Morpheuspheric extraction is one of my fortes, Mr Malfoy. I guarantee that the results will be to your satisfaction. Moreover, Miss Na'amah will certainly oversee the process as well; she will be responsible for the evaluation," the employee tries once more to persuade him, but no more persuasion is necessary. Draco slides the rest of the box onto the counter in a hurry, asks Halsey as politely as he can to let him know when the results are viewable, and leaves with his face down and to the side, away from them.

/

The weight of the box that is now out of his hands rests heavily on his mind for three long days after that. He sends four letters to Layla, one to Plutus – with Dear Plutus as the salutation –, but receives no reply from the former and only a curt note – blah blah time-consuming process that cannot be expedited whatsoever, blah blah more patience – from the other.

He even writes a letter to his wife – opening it with _Dearest Astoria_ and feeling only slightly disgraceful for it – and lastly one to his son.

When Athena takes wing with the envelope for Scorpius tied to her leg, it occurs to Draco that Lucius has never written real letters to him while he was at school. All he had ever got were short and acrimonious reprimands whenever he had brought dishonour of some form to the house of Malfoy, or monosyllabic summons when a Dark Lord had risen and he was expected home for the occasion. The thought that this – a random, simple letter without any agenda – was something that belonged entirely to him and not at all to his father pleases him beyond measure.

While Astoria doesn't answer, Scorpius does. His reply reaches him on Wednesday during lunch break, and Draco keeps it in his inner robe pocket, close to his heart, until he is finally free to open it at home. He settles comfortably into his favourite living room armchair and unfolds the message.

Scorpius writes at length about everything that goes on in this year's Hogwarts Quidditch season and how he cannot wait to try out next year, and how he wants to try out for seeker, chaser _and_ keeper, just to make sure he will make the team somehow because if he doesn't he might as well die or move to Norway and attend Durmstrang instead of remaining at Hogwarts in shame and disgrace.

He also writes about Potions class and how his partner, a Ravenclaw boy called Chen Bohan, is the most useless brewer in the history of brewing – might even cost Scorpius his E in potions – but can mince two and a half ounces of peeled shrivelfig to supreme fineness in under a minute. And also, Shrew has invited Scorpius to his birthday party during the spring holidays, but he would celebrate with his godmother in New York who shares the birthday with him and if he could please please please allow him to go please?

As he reaches the end of the scroll, Draco finds himself smiling. He reads it again.

Just as he learns about Chen's impressive knifemanship and mincing skills once more, Milly appears at the door with a pop. "There's a parcel for you, sir," she squeaks. She has already freed the messenger bird from its burden, and Draco absently instructs her to put it in the kitchen.

He sends another owl to Astoria and one to the Shrewsburys, both letters concerning Robert's birthday plans. Knowing that his father wouldn't even have considered allowing him to go to New York for three days, Draco is resolved to at least give the undertaking a chance. For his son's sake. Maybe also for his own. He is pleased, humming to himself, when he comes into the kitchen and finds the delivery on the counter where Milly has put it.

The parcel is small and oblong. There is a tag with a sender on it, but the ink is completely smudged by rain. The object is heavy in his hand as he tears it open, which is unexpectedly troublesome since it is wrapped in so many layers of durable packing paper that, after the fourth layer, he is almost convinced that there is nothing in it at all. It wouldn't have been the first prank parcel to the manor.

But eventually, a small, pointed vial tumbles out onto the table with a delicate little sound, then rolls in a half-circle before it comes to rest. The stopper is made of glass as well, and carved into the shape of a butterfly, of all things. Around the tiny neck, a ribbon is fastened. On that ribbon it says 'sample' in black block letters.

Against the dark background of the table surface, the content of the vial becomes visible. It looks like a faint fog at first, but then shimmers blue, green and orange on the edges, like the skin of a soap bubble floating through the air.

Thoughts. They look nothing like the thoughts in his father's pensieve did, but Draco knows what they are.

His dreams.

Immediately, his heart is racing fast, as if it were tripping over itself. The gears in his head start turning feverishly.

_My dreams?_

_What else would they be?_

_But why?_

Hadn't she told him that extraction would take a whole week minimum?  
_  
Why would Layla send them to me like this?_

"I will let you know when there are any results to be shared, then we will schedule another meeting right away to have a look together," he remembers her saying.  
_  
This is entirely against the agreement.  
_  
He doesn't understand, and not understanding things sets him on edge. The only thing he does understand is that the vial in his hand is the key to everything. That thin mist might as well be the source of the sum of all his pains, aches, all his tiredness and infamy, and suddenly there is anger in him, something he for quite some time hasn't had the energy for.

"Milly!" he calls, louder than is necessary, and harshly instructs, "Fetch me the empty pensieve bowl from my room. It looks like a shallow grey plate. It's on my desk. I'm using it as a drip mat for my inkwell. Now!"

The elf vanishes, reappears within seconds and almost drops the thing from fear of her obviously displeased master, but Draco just snatches it from her hands and places it in front of him on the table without much care so the bowl rings as it harshly scrapes against the tiles. Then he pulls the stopper roughly from the vial as if tearing its head off and finally upends the flask.

The contents flow out like dry ice fog doused with a bit of the Aurora Borealis. In the end, there seems to be much more of it billowing across the pensieve than there had been in the flask.

He holds his breath, like a diver would, and bends over until the tip of his nose touches the cool surface. The pull is much stronger than that of a normal pensieve. It almost feels like flying.

Or falling.

/

When he re-emerges – spat out of the swamp of his own vivid recollections after what probably only were seconds but felt like hours of horror and struggle against the undertow – he cannot move. He can hardly even breathe. There is a large, dull pain in the centre of his stomach, or maybe it is actually the centre of his entire life, his existence that's suddenly painful.

The abjection makes him want to throw up. To try and regurgitate his lunch and his dinner and his entire core along with it, the source, that black root of these foul thoughts, pictures, sounds. Feelings.

_Oh god, oh god._

That_ is what I desire?  
_  
He feels as if there is sour milk seeping from his pores. He is drenched with it.

_To be touched, caught and held down and- fucked- like that.  
_  
He feels violated.

_And embraced so fiercely, and kissed. Kissed so hard.  
_  
The world spins and spins so fast that he holds on to the table to not get thrown off. Only three nights worth of dreaming, yet there had been- so much.

_How?_ _How can this be?  
_  
_Why him?_

_Why?_

He thinks of that brief meeting on September 1st last year and how he had thought that there was something wrong and abnormal with Potter. He couldn't have been more mistaken.

That surplus, that out-of-place thing that shouldn't have been there, it was inside of _him_. For a second he considers reaching down his own gullet to try and grab it, to rip it out.

A picture of something else going down his gullet flashes before his eyes.  
_  
_A pathetic sound escapes his mouth and his knees go weak. He drags himself to the kitchen table to sit down. As he does, there is a motion in the corner of his eye and he looks up casually, thinking that it might be Milly, or the merciful Reaper himself coming to end this farce.

He freezes when he sees that it is Astoria.

She stands there, looking at him silently, pale and thin and still beautiful in her own, unobtrusively hapless way. She shares the fate of her beloved Grandma Miranda – Draco realizes he hasn't looked at his wife for quite some time, either, not really.

Beneath that emotionless face of hers, Astoria looks troubled. She looks old.

He knows that she knows, even before she comes forward and soundlessly puts down another little vial on the table, identical to his, butterfly stopper and everything. Her vial is also empty. Her fingers don't tremble at all.

"I want a divorce," she says quietly with only the merest hitch.

_What about Scorpius?_ is the first thing that comes to his mind, loud and piercing like the pain from a stab wound.

But then, he doesn't say it. Because, knowing what the two of them now know about himself, the answer is obvious.

He collapses into the chair and watches Astoria walk away.

/ **TBC**


	10. Chapter 9

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_"Bad" language ahead.  
_

_Happy New Year, everybody! _

/

**-/Chapter 9/-**

/

The heel of his hand is beginning to hurt with every blow against Plutus' shop's door. He knows it is more than an hour after closing time, that it's rather pointless and that people are staring. But there is hardly a clear thought in his head and even the clearest ones are tinged with panic. Who is responsible for this? How many 'samples' are there and who got them? How many people know?

And – why? _Why?_

Between two blows of his fist, there is a series of loud clicks in the lock. Draco stops, thinking that he might have imagined it, and tries the doorknob.

The door yields. It is open.

Without another hesitation, he storms in, ready to attack.

However, he finds Plutus and Layla's replacement at the far end of the shop, behind the counter. Plutus is in conversation via his headset – there is a small black device in his left ear which he holds up with the left hand like a bodyguard in the films, while a cigarette is smoking in his right. Halsey seems to be counting some sort of grain from one glass into the other, picking them up delicately between his thumb and forefinger and transferring one after the other from the left to the right jar.

"Boothe!" Draco almost yells and tries not to look like he's running up to them. "I demand an explanation. Now!"

"Hmm," goes Plutus, then "hmmhmm," before he taps the ash off his cigarette and wipes the residues off the counter with the back of his hand. "Yes. Well. Listen, Marcus, I got a thing here, can you hold for a second?"

As Plutus' bored look finally focusses on him, Draco finds himself too angry to even speak. So he gets the empty vial out of his cloak pocket and slams it on the counter. The little crunch of glass is satisfying in the first moment, but his palm soon starts to throb.

"Explain," he says quietly, his jaw set.

"Hum," Plutus replies, eyebrows lifted theatrically, "I had assumed that the, well, audio-visuals are self-explanatory."

Draco feels his stomach lurch and grits his teeth. Theoretically, it had been clear to him that Plutus had watched- it, but practically, it was different. Much worse.

"Why did you send this? To me, to my wife?" It's an automatism to call Astoria 'my wife'. He fears he will never break that habit, no matter what happens.

"Why, they belong to you, no? You ordered the articles, you paid for them. We delivered." As Draco looks at him speechlessly, he adds with an exaggerated frown, "You're not contesting the authenticity of the product, are you?"

Funny, now that he says it, it occurs to Draco that he hasn't doubted that those thoughts were his. Not even for a second. He shakes the memories off violently and tries to blot them out for the moment lest they overpower him.

"But why did you do this?" Draco has found his voice again, even though it sounds thinner and decidedly more pitiful than before. "Why would you not contact me properly, so we could- discuss things and- This was a private matter. A _sensitive_ matter, how could you-"

"Oh, but you don't seem to understand, Mr Malfoy," Plutus interrupts, "My company sticks to the rules set up in the contracts and abides by these rules. It is part of the philosophy to-"

"I don't give a _fuck_ about your philosophy!"

This shuts him up and makes both Plutus and Halsey stare at him for a gratifying split-second. But then the stares give way to a rather smug simper, just as Draco feels something latching onto and crawling up his legs.

"Aggression is not tolerated by this shop, I'm afraid, Mr Malfoy," Plutus explains as some sort of a binding spell wraps around his entire body, immobilizing him completely within a heartbeat.

"Now, as I was saying, this company's philosophy is to stick to the contracts." His words ooze with the fake smile on his face. "And that is precisely what we did in your case." He crouches down, comes back up from behind the counter with two scrolls and lays them before him. Paralysed as Draco is, he can't move his head and look down on them properly, but he recognizes the tassels forming the knot. One of them is possibly the very same contract he signed several months ago, in a ceremony with Layla.

Signed without reading it properly, he suddenly remembers, and his stomach clenches as if squeezed by an ice-cold hand. _Oh. Oh no._

_On__ly a dimwit would...  
_  
"Just in case you had the idea of making demands for the morpheusphere in question – you never actually paid for it. We lent it to you, and you handed it back. It and the contents pertaining to it are company property as was contractually agreed."

Plutus lets that sink in and busies himself with stubbing out his cigarette into a marble ashtray, then quickly lights a new one.

"Naturally, we would never handle such property irresponsibly. Indeed, we did with it _exactly_ what was specified," and as if to make clear what he is talking about, Plutus reaches for both scrolls and caresses them, "in the contracts."

"But-" Draco begins and is surprised that the ban actually lets him speak, even though he isn't really sure what to say. "I only made one contract with you. I don't- I don't understand."

"So much is clear," Halsey comments from the side. Draco just wants to take the heavy jar he has been putting flower seeds into these last two minutes and smash it into his handsome visage over and over until his nose caves in. Right on cue, the binding around his arms and upper body becomes so tight that breathing is suddenly an effort.

"When I say 'They belong to you' and 'you paid for it' and 'we made a contract with you', I mean 'you' in plural form. Despite the fact that both contracts explicitly state this, you seem to be unaware that we had agreements with you _and_ with Astoria Malfoy, and this company has honoured both agreements to the letter."

"What?" he wheezes after a moment's pause. Nothing makes sense. "This- can't be right. There must be some sort of mistake." _Astoria would never... _could_ never-_

The people. The people in grey, in his drawing room.

Her stony stare._ "I want a divorce."  
_  
"Oh, but it is very right, I assure you. It was contractually stipulated in the paragraphs seventeen and twenty-one that this company would disclose and deliver to both parties in due time any information and-or material gleaned during counselling appointments, given that said information or material can be deemed relevant to the contractors' relationship and-or their shared, legally effective prenuptial agreement. I do believe we can both concur that the material in question did meet this requirement."

He is suddenly quite thankful for the continuing paralysis that keeps his feet glued to the floor. He feels like fainting.

Like every single traditional prenuptial agreement between wizards in history, his and Astoria's states quite clearly that rights and benefits should be taken away from the party who broke the rules stipulated in the agreement and instead be given to the aggrieved party.

Rules, such as a prohibition of harbouring unacceptable sexual tendencies.

Rights, such as custody for joint children.

_What about Scorpius?_

"In short, Mr Malfoy, we did strictly what we were obligated to do, so you have no right whatsoever to come stomping in here making irrational demands. Is that understood?" He doesn't wait for a reaction and wouldn't have got one had he waited. "Good. Now, I assume you would like to dissolve the contract and discontinue your sessions? Very well." He makes a show of untying the knot on the left-hand scroll.

A moment passes by, then Plutus leans towards him. "If I may be so frank, Draco – and this is just my personal opinion," he murmurs, close enough now that Draco can taste his horrid cologne again underneath a thick cloud of cold tobacco smoke, and gives him a conspiratorial look. "I believe that you need therapy. Quite a lot of... radical and aggressive – therapy." And then he winks.

Draco wants claw his eyes out.

Plutus actually seems to flinch back as he sees his body tense with overwhelming hatred. The moment quickly passes, however, and the aloof attitude snaps back into place. "Halsey, would you please escort Mr Malfoy out? I am sure he has a lot to talk about with his wife, and my collocutor is still holding the line here, too. I can take care of this dissolution myself. I will send the papers to you in the coming days, Mr Malfoy. Kindly don't come near this property again, or I will have to inform the authorities."

With that, he is dismissed. Halsey steps around the counter, takes a hold of his upper arm and bodily drags him to the front door. The touch of the assistant loosens the ban's clutches around his legs so he at least doesn't have to fall onto his face. Which, in turn, stays frozen and immobile until the moment he crosses the threshold.

"I want to speak with Layla," he blurts out once his lower jaw unsnaps. Layla who has been with him ever since he fleetingly laid eyes on her in this very shop, once a wonderful dream in bronze and emerald, then scourger of all his thoughts. He knows that he needs her by his side more than he has ever needed anyone. He knows that she could tell him what to do and make everything all right again.

The next moment, memories of three days ago pass through him like a shower of ice. The way she didn't look at him, and didn't talk to him, and didn't answer his owls. Like puzzle pieces, everything falls into place and makes an appalling picture. _How else would they have got-_

Moreover, Miss Na'amah will certainly oversee the process as well; she will be responsible for the evaluation.

"That may well be, Mr Malfoy," Halsey comments with a distinct tone of condescension, "but she sure as hell doesn't want to speak with you. She also doesn't want you to speak with her. I know for a fact that she never wants to see or hear anything from you ever again."

"But she is my counsellor," Draco presses urgently, grasping at straws. _She is my counsellor, she extracted the dreams first, she must have know, must have- seen-_ "I," he starts, suddenly out of air as if he were having an asthma attack, "I have a right-"

"Listen." The shop assistant steps forward and grabs him by the collar. The physical contact works a lot like the binding spell in the shop. Draco remembers red hot that he has never been any good at close combat.

Halsey hisses at him through his teeth. "You have a right to shit. Layla _was_ your counsellor until the moment she realized _what_ she was counselling exactly. So you will not attempt to make contact with her any further, or you will be very sorry."

Draco is unhanded. He stumbles on the pavement and fights for balance. Before he can actually find it again, Halsey steps forward once more and grabs him again, by the shoulder this time, then pulls him close roughly. When he is close enough, he quietly says, "Let me tell you. Layla - she comes from a good home. A good family, with values. She and her people, they still abide by their religion, like everybody should."

Draco tries to wind himself out of the grip, but to no avail. Halsey's thumb is boring into the hollow of his clavicle and it hurts.

"You know, their religion basically tells us that the likes of you..." He trails off, readjusting his painful clutch so Draco ends up looking up to him. Once their eyes lock, he finishes, "_Your kind_ should be ground up and fed to the pigs. That's how it should be."

After another moment, he lets Draco go, even straightens the cloak where his clutch messed it up, then turns and closes the door behind him. Several clicks of the lock follow.

Draco finds that he can't stop shaking. He walks two paces and then heavily sits down on the curb. People switch to the other side of the street to avoid walking by him.

The sun has gone down when he dares to get up and apparate home.

/ **TBC**


	11. Chapter 10

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Once more, Happy New Year, y'all!_

_There's language in this chapter. I formally apologize in advance to all those who speak French. Please don't hesitate to correct the two quasi-French sentences you will encounter near the end of this chapter._

_Oh, and some... does it qualify as violence? Anyway, this chapter ends in pain. It also concludes the first half of this story._

/

**-/Chapter 10/-**

/

"Milly, bring me- bring me the aspirin from the cabinet in the bathroom, a bottle of Firewhiskey – any bottle will do – and some cigarettes. I know Astoria had some in the drawing room, for emergencies."

His house-elf vanishes with a bow and a worried if thankfully wordless glance which Draco disregards. He hurries through his house – that big empty mausoleum of his – towards his wife's sanctuary. He isn't quite sure yet what he will do when he gets there, but he already has his wand in his hand.

The doors are locked and spelt shut, but the manor knows that he is the heir, so they can't really hold him back.

A gust of wind hits him in the face when he steps into the rooms that have been – not exactly off limits, but something similar – for almost ten years.

Astoria has spent almost two thirds of her every day here for a decade, yet she hasn't left a single trace.

The rooms are empty. The wardrobes, closets, cupboards are open and gape at him, hollow and with their drawers half-open. The bookshelves are naked. The bed is bare, there are no sheets on it. No pictures on the walls, no vases with flowers on the desk. The chair has been pushed under the table as far as it goes as if it were staunchly refusing to have anyone sit on it ever again. The windows are wide open, letting the wind and rain in. There are puddles on the sills and on the floor, dotted with leaves and dirt from outside.

He doesn't know why he is surprised. He doesn't know why he feels so lost, either, now, of all moments. Not half a day ago, his wife has stood before him and told him that she would file for divorce. Two hours ago he has learned that she has had a contract with his therapist all this time, spying on him spilling his secrets. He hadn't felt lost then. But he does now.

Maybe the sight of these rooms is the last thing he needed to actually grasp what is happening, and that it is happening to him. Seeing is believing. He is as abandoned as these quarters.

When he comes to his senses next, he is on the way to the portrait hall. He flings open the doors and the torches flare up with a whoosh to illuminate the huge room with the covered windows. A murmur rises up from the portraits he just roused from their long slumber.

"Mother!" he calls and steps toward his parents' painting. Narcissa is sitting in her decorative portrait chair with the painfully slender legs, eternally looking like a thirty-five years old porcelain doll. Lucius' hand is firmly resting on her slim shoulder as he is standing behind her, towering above in the picture as he had in life.

"Draco," she acknowledges him thinly. "How nice of you to come visit. How are you? You look tired."

"I don't have time. I need the Conubium spell."

"Oh."

The way she doesn't seem troubled or astonished by this at all tells him that Astoria has been to the portrait hall not too long ago.

"Misplaced your spouse, have you, son?" Lucius' canvas eyes flash at him coldly.

"The spell, mother. You know it is my right," he speaks through gritted teeth and firmly ignores his father. His voice cuts through the papery rustle of whispered or more overt comments from the neighbouring images that cover all the walls. "But Draco, you must understand, such a spell is not something to be trifled with. Astoria might-"

"Don't you dare use that spell-" Elvira Greengrass' high-pitched voice rings out from the next frame.

Draco doesn't even let Astoria's unbearable paternal grandmother finish, and he doesn't so much as turn his head as he hurls an incendio her way. The shrieks and gasps drown in the satisfying crackling of the flame.

"The Conubium spell, mother. Now."

Acrid smoke is rapidly fills up the hall, rising to the ceiling in a dark-grey pillar and then billowing down like angry storm clouds when he finally gets what he came for.

Milly appears just in time for him to light his cigarette on the conflagration. He knows this moment will be the last – if ultimately meaningless and empty – victory for some time to come.

The spell his mother reluctantly imparted to him is designed to summon the spouse to the caster. Since the dawn of time, every pure-blooded wizards' prenuptial agreement contained the validation of this certain spell, Draco remembers learning from his father one time. "It's a time-honoured tradition", Lucius answered his question about the reasons once, as if that explained anything. Back then, Draco hadn't called his words into question. Ever.

Draco also remembers that saying the spell backwards will yield the reverse result and connect him with his 'misplaced spouse' instantaneously, no matter where she is. This is exactly what he is going for as he incants it in exact reverse order.

/

The strength of the pull of magic is truly frightening, and then almost painful, but he knows that this is the only way. It wouldn't do to pull her onto his turf, into his manor, to face her. It would only make her close up, and he is determined to get answers. In all the chaos, he desperately needs them, as something he might hold on to.

He reappears in what he immediately recognizes as the Greengrass' summer villa in Calais. The curlicues of white marble ornamenting the window sills and ceiling had been stuck in his head since the day he and Astoria had – and isn't this just painfully ironic – signed their premarital agreements and said their formal oaths in this very bureau twelve years before.

He turns around and finds himself standing right behind his soon-to-be ex-wife who is just busy looking over some papers on the same large mahogany desk that had been there at their wedding, her bony back to him, oblivious to his presence. Yet.

"Is that the contract you made with Boothe?" he asks and watches was some gratification as Astoria flinches, screams shrilly and jumps up so quickly that her chair falls over.

"Answer me," he demands. His wand is in his hand although he doesn't remember drawing it. "Is that the contract you made with them to find a reason to divorce me? Is it?" Suddenly, he feels like yelling, and there is no one there to stop him. "Is it?!"

"Get the hell away from me!" Astoria hysterically yells back at him.

There are sounds outside the door now. Draco flicks his wand toward it backhandedly and the bolts slide shut with heavy noises.

"It was all part of the plan, wasn't it?" he hisses into the clangs of the door locking. "It was from the very beginning."

Maybe it's just the anger and adrenaline fuelling his brain. Maybe it's the dull thumps from outside telling him that time would be short and that this might be the only fifteen seconds in which he would ever have the chance to get explanations. Or perhaps he had subconsciously put it all together ever since he had woken up on that Friday evening after that nap in the back of the shop, when he could've sworn he had heard someone telling him that he wasn't worthless.

"Your sister introduced me to Boothe only for that reason. Didn't she? She and you, you had this planned all along." He remembers that day for the wonderful cake Diana made, the blue horse with the rainbow mane. He remembers Daphne telling him that Astoria had hinted at him being ill – scolds himself for not knowing right then and there – and telling him that they'll give him a rebate at Boothe's shop. He remembers Daphne saying ' They're more discreet than the other health care professionals' and 'My sister may not be the most considerate person alive' and almost wants to laugh.

"You were only ever searching for a way to break the affiance unevenly, so I would come away empty-handed. Isn't that right? Well, isn't it?!"

At some point he has stepped so close to her – to use those two inches of height he has on her, and to make her feel the wrath radiating off of him, and to make her afraid of him, oh yes, even if it is low – that she can seize the wand that isn't as securely in his hand as it should be. With that moment of surprise and the extra force she can draw from her fear and her own anger, she pulls it out of his palm and suddenly she is pointing his own wand at him. Right at his throat.

Silence falls as he staggers back half a step, shaking. There is fire in her eyes that he has never seen, even though he faintly remembers wishing he could make her look at him like that just once, long ago. But that fire also makes her strangely and unspeakably ugly, bitter, and cruel. She is panting after their short fight.

"You... you repulsive little toad," she bites off the words. Her mouth is quivering. Her face is a grimace of disgust. "As if you had any idea."

Two more thumbs at the door, and a muffled voice. A male voice calling French words. Probably Christophe, Astoria's second cousin's husband. Draco faintly wonders what he would say if he knew that he had recently burnt down his ancestors' portraits.

He wants to scream 'Then tell me! Come on!', but he knows she will do it without any more incentive. Twelve years of frustration and disappointment, neatly bottled up and stacked behind a smokescreen of the gentle spouse and perfect mother, are breaking through inevitably, he can see it.

"As if you knew what it was like to be your wife, you passionless, empty-eyed, lying piece of Death Eater scum," she finally manages through her trembling rage. The wand is still pointing at his throat. "To carry that filthy name around with me – When I married you, I thought it was worth it. Boy, was I wrong."

Ah, the Death Eater accusation. She had used it only twice before, during two fights they had just before Scorpius was born. Back then, she had blamed the hormones, and then never used the term again in ten years of matrimony.

"You lured me in with your grand mansion and the promises of security and then you never gave a damn about me, you never even _looked_ at me after Scorpius was born. All you ever wanted was a little substitute-Draco, someone to secure your damn bloodline for you, someone you could heap all the expectations on that your fascist swine of a father dumped on you when you were young."

Draco sets his jaw and pushes the words down that boil inside of his chest. Of all the crimes she could accuse him of, being a bad father and doing wrong by his son was the one that truly hurt. And she knows it.

"I've wasted years in the tomb you forced me into, look at me, look at what you made me." Her face is shiny with perspiration and blotchy now, and she is trembling with suppressed rage. "Eternally parvenu, faded trophy wife of some miserable, half-broke wannabe potion master, seller of anti-rheumatics and cellulite tinctures. Twelve years. I was going _insane_," she almost grunts and actually pokes him with his own wand. "You ruined everything I could've been. Everything."

There is a shout from outside the door. Christophe has apparently started hurling spells at it to get it open.

"The only two redeeming qualities you ever had was that you severed all ties with your Death Eater friends, and that you could keep it in your pants," she suddenly pipes up and sounds like a lunatic. "So imagine my surprise when your bloody shop is reprimanded twice for dealing in shady herbs and potions to shady people – such as your good old friend Theodore Nott. Did you know he actually mentioned you in his hearing yesterday?"

He does not know. He doesn't even have a clue what this might be about. The going-ons of the outside world have been beyond his grasp for quite some time. But Astoria doesn't stop to explain.

"So that's one quality down, one to go. You see, apparently I am the object of much envy and accolades as the only woman of repute whose husband hasn't slept with every Knockturn floozy yet. Goodness gracious, how wonderful!" She swings the wand around in her hand. It trails little bursts of blood-red fireworks that die very quickly but smell intensely of sulphur.

"I wonder what they would say," she continues theatrically, "if they knew that this wonderful husband hasn't so much as touched me in a decade, but tosses off every. Single. Morning. And then leaves his spunk on his sheets for his house-elf to find, so often that that simple creature gets so worried about master's bodily functions she eventually comes to ask me about it."

Shame and irritation make an odd couple. Draco feels face go hot. He must have missed some. Too tired, too much in a hurry. "And you didn't mean for me to know about that, by that look on your face. How quaint," Astoria comments his grimace with a gleeful, condescending sneer.

He briefly considers commenting, trying to defend himself, but then sees that it is pointless. Astoria's eyes are wide and slightly mad.

"I thought you had met a woman. Some barely legal whore who had driven you into mid-life crisis," she now snarls, her lips quivering again. "Or that that slut of a counsellor would've managed to fuck you by now, like she said you would the second you got the chance, especially after you practically jumped to sign your contract with her like a trained, drooling little dog. Either would have been repugnant and pathetic enough already. And more than enough for me to get away from you, and with my son. Forever."

She lifts the wand a fraction further so that it is pointing directly at his face now.

"Instead, I have to find out that I was married all this time to a disgusting little bender who wants to be sodomized by Harry Potter, of all people."

As she starts sniggering without any joy whatsoever and explains, "I needn't have worried at all about the question of custody, they'd never let a vile pervert like you near Scorpius ever again," he lunges at her.

Suddenly all his worries about being rubbish at close combat are gone. He yanks at her hand until his wand slips from her grasp and clatters to the floor.

The other hand finds its way to her throat.

His mouth is open and his teeth are bared, to mirror her expression.

"You will not take my son away from me!" A voice that he hadn't known he had inside of him is screaming at her.

Her fingers claw at his face. Her index finger catches the thin skin under his eye and leaves a hot scratch.

Then suddenly the universe explodes in pain from multiple angles. Some sort of spell hits him in the centre of his back, and it feels as if it dislocates a pair of disks with one mighty jerk. As he petrifies in agony, Astoria uses the break and knees him in the groin. Hard.

Tears of pain are streaming sideways down his face and out of his nose. The world is askew and pulsating red and black. He is lying on the floor.

"Bon sang, qu'est-ce qui se passe?" he hears a deep voice above. "Astoria, que fais-tu? Qu'est-ce qu'il fout ici?" and her answering, "Putain de merde, ce pédé m'a assailli. Fuck!"

She keeps swearing in French for a while but the deafening roar of blood in his head and the stamping of their feet on the wooden floor so near to his ear drown out most of it.

He doesn't know how long he is lying there, or what they are talking. All he can think of is how, in two months, when the Hogwarts term is over, he will be standing at platform 9¾, not with all the other parents, but a little at the back and to the side. He will catch a short glimpse of a blond head as Scorpius jumps off the train, but although his son is taller now than he was before, he isn't nearly tall enough to not be swallowed by the crowd immediately.

When the crowd disperses, though, he is gone.

Draco imagines his son being glad, relieved that they haven't met, because now he knows, he _knows_. Everyone's talking about it, and Scorpius wishes he could make everyone forget his last name.

He thinks of six years worth of glimpses of blond hair and letters that become shorter, rarer and ever more estranged, until the booming quiet of his manor's empty halls reverberates deep in his stomach, until it hurts.

Christophe grabs him by the shoulder and turns him onto his back, wordlessly folds a brass-coloured candle holder into his palm and tucks his wand into his right pant pocket.

"Va te faire foutre, eh?" he says and slaps his cheek twice like an old buddy. "Salaud."

Before he can even arrange his thoughts enough to answer, the portkey in his hand activates and pulls behind his navel.

The dirty rain water from the puddle in Astoria's now empty quarters slowly soaks his shirt and his hair. The candle holder rolls out of his limp hand and over the boarded floor, out of his reach.

He lies there with his body and his heart aching for uncounted minutes and contemplates not getting up, ever.

/ **TBC**


	12. Chapter 11

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Thanks to Chrispyles.99 and scadooden for fav'ing and/or following this story!_

_Aaand we finally arrived in the second half of this story. From here on in, there's lots of Draco/Harry interaction __*yay*_

_This and the following chapter are the reason why this whole story got so long. The original idea was nice and short, but one night, the muse came to my bed and kissed me, and I couldn't stop writing and it grew and grew... (Innuendo intented.)_

_Apropos length: I just finished segmenting the rest of it. Turns out there'll be 25 chapters, plus pro- and epilogue, so including this one, there's 16 to go. I hope you brought patience :)_

/_  
_

**-/Chapter 11/-**

/

Draco hardly even remembers the nights and days that immediately followed that incident. With so much on his mind, he had gone through the motions, apparated to his shop and taken the most potent sleeping potions and other drugs – painkillers, for his groin – from the shelves. Then, he had proceeded administering them to himself until his brain would stop screaming at him. Until he could stop thinking of losing his son, and losing his face, and until pictures of himself, writhing naked under the lithe but strong body of Harry Potter, drowned in white noise.

"Nott testified under veritaserum that he got some of those Mickey Finns he distributed among those Muggle teenagers from me," Draco relates, skipping all the sordid details, even though he suspects that Potter knows more about Nott than he himself does. "Or rather, from my shop, since I certainly wasn't there personally at the time. I would have recognized him and turned him away. Magnus, my clerk, sold them to Nott. He was still on his probation period back then, he didn't know and didn't dare to turn down clients, no matter how shady."

Now that the storytelling is coming to a close, Draco goes back to nervously tapping his foot against the chair leg. He had hoped for something like an ultimate point to become clear in the course of the narration, for something like a purpose or agenda to emerge, but it hasn't. Judging by Potter's wordless, searching look, he has noticed as well. Draco swallows with a dry mouth. _What am I doing here?_

_What do I want from him?_

_No. Not that. Shut up. Goddamn, stop it._

He coughs.

"Four days ago, I received a bunch of owls from Boothe. Papers, Ministry-approved and stamped property certificates for the morpheusphere, contract dissolution confirmations, the whole nine yards, in authenticated duplicate. Also, an agreement form for the dissolution of my marriage – divorce papers, basically – and a howler reminding me of a dizzying debt outstanding, and of what would happen, should I not sign all those papers and... and also that I should strongly consider signing Astoria's waiver. Which arrived the day before yesterday."

He had set the damn thing on fire while it was still attached to the bird. Good thing that Goyle still owed him a favour and had connections to an owl vet who hadn't asked any questions. He felt deeply sorry for the animal, especially because the document had been made damage-proof and mended itself promptly. So it hadn't even been worth the singed feathers and the fright.

"The marriage agreement between Astoria and me, as is usual, specifies that, in case of... infringement, custody for joint children – for Scorpius – will fall to the aggrieved party," he continues without emotion. He had raged and seethed over this for days, and now he is just spent.

"That means that Scorpius would live with her, that she would be his only legal guardian and that she would get to make all legal decisions relevant to his life until he is seventeen. Even so, as his father, I would still have the right to meet him, given his consent and Astoria's inability to give good reasons as to why that shouldn't be possible. That's standard procedure in the wizarding world."

This was also specified in Astoria's waiver, which then went on to add to and subtract from that standard. He had read it over and over, and ripped it to shreds over and over, only to have the shavings mend back together again in his hands more quickly than he could rip them up.

"However, Astoria isn't happy with that last stipulation." He puts his hands on the fake wood armrest and squeezes it until his fingers hurt. "She wants me to completely relinquish any and all rights to see him. I'd sign away... parenthood. Basically."

There is a pain behind his eyes, a stinging like tiny needles. He blinks rapidly to make it go away.

"You haven't signed it yet, have you?" Potter probes quietly after a few seconds of silence.

He shakes his head once in reply, but then adds, "But I really have no choice." It feels like there is a boulder sitting on his chest, and at the same time he feels like laughing, laughing until he cries. "If I don't sign it and send it back to her by next week's Sunday, she'll see to it that my... the thoughts, the... pictures are made public."

He doesn't need to say that, if that should happen, it wouldn't matter that he would continue to be legally married, and legal guardian of Scorpius. None of his rights as a father would matter any more. Scorpius would never want to see him again. And Draco would never want to be seen by his son again, either. There was a chance that Scorpius had inherited that cold, ugly stare from his mother or his paternal grandfather, and Draco doesn't think that he could bear being subjected to it. The thought alone makes his insides clench.

Across the table, Potter frowns darkly at him, probably at the prospect of having gay porn featuring himself distributed by _Witch Weekly_.

"Yesterday morning, I got further correspondence from Boothe. He proposed an exchange – and I mean 'proposed' as in 'vowed' in written form. He vowed to cede the morpheuspheres and any and all content drawn from them to me, in exchange for my signature on that bloody waiver."

He feels great shame for spending several long hours considering – _seriously _considering – signing. He had walked around the manor aimlessly with his hands pulling his hair like a mad person, reasoning that, in six short years, he would still be Scorpius' dad, and that they could get together then if Scorpius so desired, as opposed to being the arsefucker everyone was gossiping about and who had made his own son's life a living hell so recklessly.

He hasn't yet managed to fully convince himself that not signing has been the right thing to do.

"Yesterday noon, Boothe sent me another howler. He tactfully inquired what the fuck I was taking so long for. Also, to pile the pressure, there was yet another waiver, this time for two of my three Gringott's vaults and what is effectively the ownership of my potion shop. Again, if I don't sign all that, along with Astoria's piece of bumph, the _Prophet_ will get a sample vial." He presses his lips together to keep a string of swearwords inside that is threatening to make its way out. All this struggle does in the end is make him feel endlessly tired, though. He sighs.

"I contacted you right after I got that last owl from him." Leaning back, he breathes out deeply as he realizes that everything is said now.

In the books and films, people are always relieved after making a confession or sharing a particular burden with someone else. They feel light as feathers, they see their paths clearly or feel slightly more able to deal with their problems one way or another.

Yet another literary lie. Draco merely feels empty and weak. The silence that briefly falls over their table after almost two hours of storytelling is filled with drilling noise from his thoughts.

And there is still no point or purpose in sight. Draco rubs his eyelids until sparks flit through his vision.

_Why have I told you all this?_

_You, of all people?_

"So, let me get this straight," Potter suddenly speaks up in a no-nonsense manner that gets under his skin in all the wrong ways. Draco wishes he'd behave the way he'd imagined him to at least a little, even just a tiny bit. Instead, he's calm, focussed, completely serious. He still looks him in the eyes which makes his stomach backflip.

"Plutus Boothe and your wife are threatening to make your, uhm, dreams public if you don't rescind your premarital contract and abandon any claim on custody for Scorpius. Also, they want you to hand over your shop and what is left of the Malfoy fortune."

"I was surprised Boothe doesn't want the manor, really, seeing its the only thing of actual value in my possession." Draco shrugs. "Maybe he'll demand it once he sees how empty those vaults are. This whole blackmail thing makes me think that he didn't really believe what he learnt from Layla's reports about my financial situation, or maybe he suspects that I lied to her in some way." He rubs the bridge of his nose. A deep red headache is blooming brightly right between his eyebrows, as if someone had driven a nail in there. "Or maybe he really just wants to put more pressure on me, as if that was necessary. It doesn't really matter at all," he mumbles, certain that Potter will hear. "Money isn't important at this point."

"But I believe it is," Potter contradicts him.

"My son-"

"I know, he's most important to you, yes. But let's not disregard the money grab just yet." He readjusts his glasses and shifts towards him in his chair.

"Look, as far as I understand it, Boothe and his little enterprise are mighty well off, yes? They're filthy rich because there's zero competition, and they're obviously doing something right with their clientèle. So what on earth would they really need your money for? The little you have left – the little you don't already owe them anyway."

Draco frowns and opens his mouth to interject something, but Potter talks much like he used to play Quidditch.

"Plus, isn't it odd that the demand for money came like an afterthought? Astoria and Daphne obviously goaded Boothe into doing all this to you just in order to get Astoria out of the marriage contract and separate you from your son permanently. Well, they've accomplished that, completely, just by using your thoughts against you. But suddenly they also want more money from you. Like they actually want you broke."

"So, what?" Draco erupts angrily. "I don't care about the money! They might as well have it all, and the stupid manor house as well. It's a grave anyway without Scorpius there."

The prospect of having to remain in that house, with its wide halls void of his son's voice, makes his breath catch so painfully that he can't continue. He rubs his eyes. To think that he had once considered himself being used to loneliness – ridiculous now.

Once more, Potter doesn't go by the rules Draco had thought up before. He doesn't mind being yelled at and instead yells right back at him, albeit with somewhat more control and all the gravitas of a top-tier Auror.

"And how and where would you raise your son if they took your _stupid_ _manor _and all of your _stupid_ _money _away from you, huh? With all due respect, Malfoy, you haven't got the foggiest what it actually means to be poor and support a kid on nothing but love and alms. Believe me, it sucks, it sucks for your child, it sucks even worse for you and therefore it's not even a bloody option, so quit the melodramatic self-sacrificing for a second and listen to me, will you?"

Draco doesn't know how to meet this sort of determination, so he sits in silence.

"Good," Potter acknowledges his submission. "As I was saying before, wanting your money isn't for them to get rich – they already are rich_, _and they can't get rich on your money any more, and they know it. So what's the deal? Why would they want you broke?"

By the tone of his voice it's obviously more of a rhetorical question. Draco sighs. "Look, Potter, I'm too tired and- just tired for riddles, could you-" he pleads.

Potter immediately complies. "What I'm saying is, this money thing doesn't make a lick of sense. Unless."

"Unless...?" Draco asks through clenched jaws.

Potter leans back and nods as if to himself before answering, "Unless they're scared of what you could spend that money on, of course."

Draco frowns at him. "What I could spend it on," he echoes.

"I think they want to make sure you won't get help. Of the legal nature."

"Potter, I don't-"

"They fear you could use that money of yours and get a lawyer or a legal counsellor of some sort – you'd need money to buy their services, surely. And if they fear that, that means that the whole thing isn't as watertight as it looks. It means that a lawyer could and would find a flaw – maybe in the principle, maybe in the contracts or whatever – and blow the whole thing up for them."

Draco doesn't quite know what he is saying but he remembers faintly a night he came home and found Astoria and Daphne arguing in the kitchen. Though he doesn't remember their words, something is tingling in the far back of his head.

"Which means," Potter closes enthusiastically, "what you have to do, and quickly, is to entrust the whole thing to-"

"No." It is too crass to even bear contemplation, although it hurts like hell to shoot down this glimmer of hope so unscrupulously. "No, that's out of the question."

"Malfoy, this is your best chance to save your reputation, and to hold on to your son," Potter entreats him, eyes piercing. "Wouldn't it be bet-"

"No!" He shakes his head sharply. "I will not share this with yet another counsellor, been there, done that. Every person more to know about... _that_ isone too many already. Not to mention that there's no guarantee whatsoever that this wouldn't just provoke Boothe and Astoria into going public before their whole deal goes bust."

He doesn't mention that, firstly, he cannot be sure that the counsellor he'd be approaching isn't somehow connected to the four grey-clad persons Astoria had once gathered in their drawing room, and secondly, he isn't sure that he even has enough money left to employ a trustworthy counsellor at this point.

Some moments of silence pass. Potter stares at him and it makes him want to squirm in his chair but he remains motionless. He can almost hear the cogs working behind that scarred forehead.

"You shared it with me," is what Potter finally settles for. The _Why?_ is implied.

_The point, the purpose, quick, come up with something._

"Because you are involved." Draco looks away from him. "It was the decent thing to do, to give you a warning."

___I hoped you would tell me what to do. _Also, I had hoped you could wave your wand and say a word and make everything all right. 

_I knew that hope was stupid, but I also wanted to see you, and that was even stupider. If two wrongs make a right, then two stupids make a clever, except they don't and I'm a fucking idiot._

Potter doesn't reply anything to that. After another short pause, he asks, pointedly innocent, "You're sure you don't want anyone else to help?"

"Yes, I am sure. " Draco narrows his eyes. "You have someone in mind, don't you?" As it dawns on him, the irritation is instantaneous. "Oh no. No, Potter, I forbid you. You will swear an oath to me that you will not carry this to Granger."

Potter lifts his hands in defence. "Okay, okay. I-"

"Swear it!" he hisses at him, and Potter rolls his eyes.

"Okay. I swear, I will not. It's your secret, and it's safe, I promise. I also promise you that everything would be much easier if you... could bring yourself to... but, yeah. I get it." He trails off, then reaches out to his cup and takes a sip of coffee that is undoubtedly ice-cold already.

"Duly noted," Draco says, and then, with that phony agenda still sour on his tongue, "So. I think everything has been said, so I wouldn't want to make demands on your time." He buttons up his jacket.

"Hang on," Potter interrupts, sets the cup back down and motions with his hand, "Stay put. I'm not done yet."

"Potter, I'm really thankful that you took so much time-"

"Malfoy." He says it almost gently. "Shut up. Please. Sit down."

Draco, in mid-movement of getting up, freezes and gingerly sits back down.

Potter turns to the waiter who is just strolling by and orders two alcoholic drinks. The young man nods a 'sure thing' and heads off to his spot behind the bar. Not without another side glance at Draco.

"I don't want-"

"Trust me, you'll want." Potter leans forward so his elbows are on the table as well and folds his hands. Draco involuntarily imagines Aurors studying training videos on interrogation and negotiation techniques and watching scenes from _Criminal Intent_ over and over again.

"I have an idea," Potter announces. "You won't like it, but regardless of that, I think it's a good idea. Do you want to hear it?"

Draco stops short of telling him that it isn't actually a fair question, and that he would need a smidgen more information on that idea – other than 'I think it's good' – in order to make a sound decision about whether he'd actually want to hear it.

Then again, it's just like that time that never took place except in his head, with his hands bound above and behind his head, his legs already spread apart – he didn't really have a choice to make then, and he doesn't now.

So he nods pro forma and Potter tells him.

/ **TBC**

_Any guesses what dear Harry's genius plan is?  
_


	13. Chapter 12

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

___ Even though there are no reviews (*sadface*) I see you on my stats page._ Thank you for reading!  


_Ff dot net seems to have some server problems._

/

**-/Chapter 12/-**

/

"Boothes' have made a contract with you stating that the thoughts contained within the morpheusphere – actually, the morpheu_spheres_, because we have to assume that the allegedly broken one also contained one night worth of dreams, yes? Which led them to actually blackmailing you like this in the first place, because they couldn't have known about your partialities before – uhm- that the thoughts within the two morpheusphere_s_ legally belong to them, yes? And that they can do with them as they please, which is why they have you under their thumb. Yes?"

"Yes, Potter, you know that, I certainly know that. What is your point?" _Such an actor manqué, such dramatic tension. _He rolls his waiter comes and sets down two glasses of alcoholic beverage, one of which Draco really wants to throw into his face for interrupting. The other one would fly right into the face of Potter who takes a long, deliberate sip as if he had all the time in the world.

Finally, after what feels like an eternity, Potter weighs his head and says, "They never made a contract with _me_, though."

Moments go by in which Draco waits for some sort of epiphany as to what he's playing at. None comes.

"What does this have to do with anything?" He wonders faintly if Potter knows how much he wants to strangle him right now. _He probably does. _Draco feels his eyelid twitch.

"They wouldn't have any rights or authority whatsoever to do anything with _my_ thoughts. I'm not technically a lawyer, but even I know that to mess with other people's pensieves is so completely illegal it might land them in Azkaban. It's a grave privacy violation."

A frustrated sigh escapes Draco's mouth. Irritation is mounting, especially since he has the sinking feeling that he should be able to get what Potter is driving at, but his brain feels too tight and worn. "Again, what does this have to do with anything?" he snarls and can no longer hold back the biting sarcasm. "I mean, congratulations to you, you're not the one who has his perverted thoughts held ransom by-"

"But _what if they were?"_ Potter cuts in. "What if I claimed they had _my_ thoughts instead of yours?"

After a brief jolt of surprise, Draco finds his tongue. "What good would that do?"

"As I just said," Potter explains patiently, "I never gave them any authority whatsoever over _my_ thoughts. They couldn't show them, sell them, share them - hell, technically, they couldn't even _have_ them without it being illegal. In fact, they'd have to turn themselves in to get their own memories wiped. Legislation has become rather strict on that since Bloom and Longman."

Draco has heard the two names before, connected to some sort of big Wizengamot embezzlement case some four, five years ago. Potter would know, being an employee of the Ministry and all. Right now, however, isn't a good time to review old legal cases.

"But they aren't _your t_houghts, Potter," he reminds him, desperate. "The point is moot. They know they're mine. _I_ know they're mine." There was never any question about that.

"Did you certify that anywhere?" Potter leans forward once more, so far Draco fears he will soon bridge the entire table. "Did you give your signature anywhere or make any other legally binding statement that ensures one hundred percent that what you handed over in those two morpheuspheres are only and exclusively your thoughts?"

"No, but- It's beyond any reasonable doubt." He doesn't know why he suddenly feels scared.

"How so?" Potter probes.

"I obtained the boxes from them and handed them back. In person."

"Circumstantial. Doesn't say anything about whose thoughts are inside."

"They both stood under _my_ bed?" he suggests.  
_  
_"Are there witnesses for that, other than yourself?"

"No-Yes," he corrects himself. "Milly, my house-elf. I explicitly instructed her to leave the morpheuspheres untouched both times." He remembers her wary glances at them, too. Everything is always so clear in hindsight.

"Was Milly present during the night when the boxes were actually being filled up with thoughts?"

"Well, no, but-"

"So it could've been someone else dreaming in that bed of yours and filling up the spheres."

He rolls his eyes. _Forget about actor manqué, he should've been a bloody barrister. He was born to cross-question. _"Yes," he heaves a long-suffering sigh. "Theoretically, but it's far-fetched."

"Not so far-fetched any more if The Boy Who Lived personally corroborates the assertion."

Draco stares at him.

Potter raises his eyebrows, shrugs and takes another sip from the glass, muttering a "_Boy_ Who Lived. Gee, now I feel old. That's how Baby Spice must feel" into it.

Draco feels his lips forming a circle for a 'what' or a 'why' but neither word actually makes it out of his mouth before Potter goes on.

"I could tell them that I was sleeping in your bed those nights, and that those dreams might as well be mine, which would defeat their legal claim over any of the material, dismantle their entire blackmail strategy, also defeat your wife's claim of grievance and thus her legal reasons to get to divorce you unevenly, and make their every action gravely illegal, all in one fell swoop." He actually looks quite pleased with himself as he finishes.

Draco remains wordless, so Potter can keep going, spinning his ludicrous ideas.

"Your wife would have nothing with which she could assert pressure on you, and you'd get normal partial custody because you could go on to divorce normally – if you, uh, wanted to, which I assume you do. You'd keep your money and home and no one would ever be able to take so much as a single, solitary peek at those fantasies of yours. Or, rather, mine."

Draco's thoughts are busy crashing into the sentence 'I was sleeping in your bed' like a horse might into a log fence that's too high. He bites the inside of his cheek until it hurts, then shakes his head to clear it.

"But that'd never work," he hurries to say to reign in his stupid thoughts. "Not only would they never believe you – and, I mean, why on earth would they? Why would you-" He skips the _sleep with me_. "What's important is, it'd provoke them, just like taking a counsellor would. Astoria would-"

"No, you see, that's where you are wrong," his opposite contradicts him cheerily. "The matter would be entirely different. They'd have _me_ on their hands, and they'd be potentially distributing _my_ thoughts. As I said, not only is this really, really illegal. I'd threaten them with accusation of slander, and whatever else comes to mind. From what I gather, this Boothe fellow is not an idiot and very fond of his lucrative enterprise. Imagine what that kind of publicity would do to a shop that lives on word of mouth alone anyway. Boothe'd never risk it, no matter how much your wife might rage and spit, I promise you that. There's no way in hell."

"But-"

"Malfoy, it's like all your sentences begin with 'but', why is that?" Potter murmurs, obviously miffed about the fact that his brilliant idea didn't get enough appreciation.

"_But_," Draco insists with some force, "they aren't _your_ dreams. If you seriously challenged their claim on the content of the morpheuspheres, the whole thing would go to court. At court, they'll give you veritaserum, you'd be exposed as a liar. End of story, plus some half a dozen more people in the know." Draco throws up his hands and sags into his chair. "See? It's a nice idea but it cannot work." For a second he is very tempted to have a long drink from the glass in front of him.

"Well," Potter utters and turns his own glass between his hands. "That's where the other part of the idea comes into play. The part which you won't like at all." Green eyes meet his across that short distance as the man says, "Because it involves implanting these dreams of yours in my brain. And that, of course, means that I would... need to see them."

A strangled 'no' slips out of his mouth as Potter is already busy explaining further without taking notice of it.

"Well, to be exact, it'd be even more than just seeing, per se. You see, there's a technique I've learned in Auror training. It was originally meant for communication between units and the coordinators on raids, but it has lots of theoretical applications – it's basically telepathy in the very basic sense. Thought transference, one brain to another via pensieve or something analogous. Comes in handy when you have big, complex strategies and not much time to explain them, or when you want to make sure that the other party is filled in on every single detail. They ran some tests with that spell a decade or two ago, down in the Department of Mysteries. I had the paper on my desk some time back, utter rubbish to read, lots of stuff about whether or not that implanted idea would lead to the very same cognitive patterns even after the implantation, too meta to even take seriously. But the interesting part is that the foreign thought is incorporated so seamlessly into the new host's memory that it becomes indistinguishable from their actual memory and isn't detectable as foreign thought by outside forces. Kind of like Inception, really – have you seen Inception? – just that it's self-inception, because the caster must actively plant that thought himself. He won't really forget that these thoughts are not his own, but due to the seamless implantation, outside questioning can never successfully detect-"

"No!"

People are staring. Potter is staring. He must have yelled it more loudly than he had intended, but his ears are so full of rushing blood that he can hardly hear himself think.

When he blinks, he sees himself leaning back in his favourite armchair. His eyes are half-shut in relaxation.

"Malfoy, I'm telling you, this can work," Potter says quietly when the other guests are starting to mumble and converse again.

He sees Potter, naked, kneeling in front of him at his feet, between his spread legs, upper body leaning onto his lap.

"I don't care." He knows he sounds like a petulant child.

His mind's eye sees Potter's head slowly bobbing up and down, guided by two hands buried in his dark hair.

_I would need to see them.  
_  
He breathes in but there seems to be no air.

"This meeting is over."

With that, he gets up and flees.

/

"Malfoy!" Potter actually runs after him, ten steps behind because he has left him in that café to pay the bill, but catching up quickly.

Draco supposes that this is a scene that would have been highly enjoyable in a novel or a film, with the swelling music and descriptions of hearts pounding and intense but uplifting desperation as the running protagonist is in a highly symbolically charged fight with his or her own coat, trying to put the protective garment on while running through the battering rain.

As it is, there is no music, though, and his heart isn't pounding so much as hammering sickeningly in his chest. Disappointingly, there is also no uplifting feeling. Only desperation – to get away from Potter. He buries his hands, clenched to fists, in his coat pockets after he finally succeeds in slipping into it.

"No means no!" he barks over the noise of a London bus thundering along with its tyres hissing through rain puddles. "I appreciate-"

"Do you know that our sons are best friends?"

For a moment, he thinks he has misheard him. He stops in his tracks, turns and blinks at him stupidly.

"Scorpius hasn't told you yet, has he?"

"What?" he testily answers the question with a question, stumped and frightened about the idea of Potter knowing something about his child while he himself does not.

"Albus – Al, my youngest son, and Scorpius. They are best mates. Met on the Express, got into a fist fight about the food trolley, ended up sharing and have been virtually inseparable ever since. Al even asked the hat to put him into Slytherin just because of your boy, and it did."

Draco doesn't know what to say. He feverishly wonders why Scorpius wouldn't tell him, why he knows about Bobby 'Shrew' Shrewsbury, Anthony Prince, Mariella Lawless, and even Chen Bohan, undisputed shrivelfig mincing champion, and every single detail of the current Hogwarts Quidditch affairs, but never heard of his son's friendship with fellow Slytherin Albus Potter.

"You see, my son would never forgive me, if I just walked out on his best friend's dad and made Scorpius suffer by sitting back and letting it happen, you know?" Potter shrugs and takes off his glasses which have become wet from the drizzle. "Damn this weather," he mumbles.

"I'll handle this myself," Draco hears himself saying mechanically. _Why wouldn't he tell me this?_ "I don't want or need your help." _Does he _know_? _"And you certainly don't have to feel responsible for-"

"Utter bollocks."

His dismissive rolling of the eyes makes Draco's temper flare up in anger.

"Fuck you, Potter!" he spits and starts to walk away.

"No, seriously," Potter says, walking right after him. "You must be kidding me – you don't need help, what? Malfoy, you're a mess."

"Get away from me."

Potter doesn't even hear him.

"Your letters were addressed to Harold J. Potter, you know? 'Esteemed Auror Potter' – Merlin, if that isn't a cry for help, I don't know what is. I knew what I was signing up for from the start. And I still showed up, didn't I?"

Draco is setting a brisk pace, with Potter keeping up easily. There is a road crossing ahead, and the pedestrian lights are red, so he turns right just to be able to keep running.

"I am seriously trying to help you right now, Malfoy. I told you there'd be better ways, surer ways – I'm not a jurist. There are favours I could call in for you, the whole problem would be fixed in no time, because you're being _wronged_ here. They are committing a crime against you. There are laws that would help and protect you."

His stomach clenches as he holds back angry outbursts of the do-you-think-this-hasn't-already-come-to-mind- variety to use the breath for running instead.

"But since you don't want anyone else to help you, I'm the one who's left. And you _want_ me to help, or you wouldn't have asked me in the first place. Don't lie, this wasn't just a friendly heads-up and we both know it."

"I admit it, then: I was a fool," Draco growls at him and chides himself for not understanding right away that imparting this secret to someone with chronic saviour complex and helper syndrome might not be such a good idea. "I was wrong. It was a big mistake."

He abruptly stops by the entranceway of a former store whose windows are plastered with bills and graffiti, out of sight from possible observers on the road. Perfect for getting away.

He is too winded for apparition, though. Potter stops with him, hardly even breathing fast, like a far superior predator.

"I owe your mother my life, you know," Potter suddenly says. He is still standing in the rain and looking at him hiding in this entranceway through rain-splattered glasses, cornering him.

"We all owe her. The whole world does. If she hadn't lied to Voldemort for me, everything would've gone very differently. We might've lost the war. Lots of people would have died."

_Instead, only a few- _Draco doesn't finish the thought in his head.

"I'm not my mother," he replies, tight-lipped. "You owing her doesn't mean you now owe me."  
Now that the race is over, the cold is rapidly sneaking through his clothes. He sniffles.

"And speaking of owing things," he continues feebly, "I owe you my life, two or... maybe three times over. So really I'm the one owing you favours." He sniffles again. "Not that anyone's keeping count."

"Is that so?" Potter crosses his arms in front of his chest, as if to keep himself warm.

"It is." He sighs. "This whole thing is just a mess and a... a disgrace. I didn't think it through. I should never have..." He falls silent and rubs his eyes with cold fingers. "I will head home now."

"Tell you what, then," Potter says instead of a goodbye. "I'm calling in two of these favours right now. Firstly: Reconsider," he says, doesn't give Draco the chance to interrupt. "And secondly: Two days. It's Wednesday. I'll be in that café again on Friday, six thirty. I'll wait until seven."

"Did you listen to me? I don't- You don't need-"

"Take these two days and think it all through," he cuts him short with another of those piercing, determined stares Draco had been subjected to several times today. "If you decide to come, bring all the papers and we'll try to find a solution together."

That stare makes the 'I have already thought it through, the answer is NO' get stuck in his throat. Potter takes half a step toward him so his voice echoes in the little cave he is now effectively trapped in.

"I swear, I won't breathe a word of what you have told me this afternoon to anyone, and should you place your trust in me, I'll gladly make an Unbreakable Vow with you to assure you that your secrets are safe with me."

There is nothing sensible he can respond to that, so he bites his tongue, looks to the floor and wishes his heart would stop beating so madly, wishes he wouldn't break sweat because he is closer than an arm's length. He wishes his thoughts would stay put instead of taking those words of his and running amok with them. _Stupid, stupid!_

_This is for his own son, and for Scorpius, and for mother, and for his own guilt. This is not for-_

"You need someone on your side for this, Malfoy. For yourself, and for your son. I'm offering. Think about it."

He takes two steps back the way they've come and is out of sight behind that bill-plastered shop front in an instant as if he had never been there at all.

Draco leans back against the grimy glass of the door and breathes in and out.

/ **TBC**


	14. Chapter 13

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Thank you, Nia. Just, thank you.  
_

_And thank you, Dora Malena, for following!_

_We arrived at halftime, folks! So many chapters already and I still don't know how to properly format my chapters, or how to not get utterly confused by line breaks and by how my slashes and italics seem to randomly disappear... *sigh*_

_Anyway! Unresolved sexual tension ahead :) Please enjoy._

/

**-/Chapter 13/-**

/

All the other days before, he had managed to drag himself to the bathroom and turn up the cold water. Twice he hadn't even taken off his pyjamas before putting himself under the freezing stream.

Today of all days, he failed.

For just a moment, his head wasn't awake yet, and his hand had been down there already anyway. He imagined his fingers were someone else's. That someone was lying next to him in his huge, empty bed, jerking both Draco and himself off in quick, synchronous movements, face crunched up with pleasure and lower lip caught between his teeth and that was all it took.

Breakfast tastes like self-loathing and shame.

The top right corner of the _Prophet_ reads Friday 21st of February. Ironically, Potter is on the front page, in full Auror rig, medals pinned to the coat lapel, shaking hands with newly elected director of Azkaban, Felicity Milton-Eastchurch, promising close cooperation and continuing communication between the executive Ministry branches and the corrections facilities. Eastchurch bravely smiles a plastic smile into the cameras and doesn't let Potter's hand go during the entire loop of the photo, as if their palms had fused together.

Today, he packs a briefcase before work. The shiny leather briefcase Astoria had given him as a present on his 28th or maybe 29th birthday, the one he had never used before because there was nothing a potionmaker could possibly use it for. _Unless he is forced to fight for his child's custody at some point._ Contracts, certificates, waivers, written agreements, statements, everything is in there in neat little compartments.

Into a little pocket, half-hidden in the inner lining, he slides a photograph. In it, a five year old Scorpius zooms around on a toy broom in the summer sunshine. Every time he looks at it, Draco swears he can feel his heart swelling in his chest, pushing against his lungs until it becomes harder to breathe. He cannot look at the picture for very long.

He tells himself, up until the very second he closes up shop at twenty-nine minutes past six, that he hasn't decided yet, or that there is a decision for him to make at all.

In the process of walking down the pavement toward May's Café – but on the other side of the road – he tells himself that he is only walking so fast because he is late and because being late is neither polite nor the Malfoy way, and not at all because he is desperate, and certainly not because he is looking forward to seeing Potter again. He clutches the briefcase handle with one sweaty palm while the other hand is clenched to a tight fist in his coat pocket.

He almost walks past it but doesn't quite make it. From across the street he looks in through the shop window, a too-brightly lit rectangle in the muddywinter night, and sees Potter sitting there on the same table they had two days before, with a big mug of beverage – probably tea – a large book and several papers before him. Oddly, the sight isn't surprising at all.

He promptly remembers this morning, then shakes his head to send the memories away like fleas. "Not the same," he mutters to himself and quickly looks around him to see whether anyone has heard him or seen his mouth move.

The waiter is keeping Potter from reading and drinking. It is the same young man who had kept glancing at him two days before, and who had definitely heard him say 'In my head, I've slept with you countless times' as he brought Potter the water he had ordered.

Potter smiles and nods and the waiter – probably a student working part-time, in his mid-twenties, his short, dark-blonde hair fashionably gelled to a pointy shape – talks and gestures and laughs.

Draco almost gets himself run over when he finally crosses the street. He cusses loudly and throws insults after the car that had come out of nowhere and clipped him as it drives off swerving, horn still yowling. He is shaking a little when he makes it to the pavement.

Potter is still deep in conversation with the waiter, oblivious. Draco lets out a long breath and walks in.

He reaches the table just as Mr Pointy Hair says, "-just hard to find something so special."

Potter fixes his eyes on him. "Malfoy," he says, and adds with a grim smile that says 'I'm glad I didn't waste my time by coming here' and 'This occasion isn't really a reason for smiling' , "You came."

"Yes, I apparently did," Draco responds and wishes he wouldn't sound so breathless. Then again, he _had_ almost been run over by a car very recently, so perhaps it was only normal.

"I asked Paul here if we could push two tables together so we could have more space to study." Potter gestures at the waiter whose name is Paul, apparently, and who doesn't quite meet his eye when he smiles a thin welcoming smile in Draco's general direction. "Paul, could you get another cup of tea for him, please?"

"Sure thing," Paul mumbles and leaves.

Draco is still looking after him, waiting for the inevitable glance back, when Potter gets up from his seat to make space for another. In one surreptitious motion, he waves his wand to coax an empty chair from the neighbouring table closer and surrounds them both with the same anti-eavesdropping spell he used on Wednesday. "Let's get to it, then," he motions him to have a seat.

"You don't owe me this," Draco says, fingers clenched around the handle of the briefcase.

He doesn't know exactly what he's hoping for him to say or do. A cold shiver lances up his spine when he finds that, should Potter now change his mind - drain the cup, shut the book, pack up and go home – he wouldn't have the faintest idea what to do. At some point in the past, everything had started to depend on Potter.

He is aware that this is the very last moment before the avalanche is set off. The very last. Point of no return.

He wishes he could just wake up now.

Potter gives him a level look, sits back down and says, nodding toward his luggage, "Do you have the papers in there? We need to know that contract of yours verbatim or else this won't work."

/

At least half an hour has passed and neither of them has said a word.

Potter is poring over his contract more intently than he himself had ever managed to. When he tried it, just some nights ago, it had seemed like every word of it had been deriding him from the parchment. Whichever line he had tried to focus on, the words in the neighbouring lines, in the periphery of his visions, had formed the words 'too late now'. The hallucination had become so intense that he had to lie down.

He has just reached the second verdict of the Bloom and Longman case whose files Potter had brought along, court reports so riddled with references to obscure wizarding laws that he had spent most of thirty minutes leafing through the Wizarding Legislative Code Potter had also provided, when Potter puts his pencil down with a sigh. He reaches for his teacup and sips on it, then makes a face because the tea is long cold.

Glancing at him Draco notices how tired he looks, and it dawns on him that he has had a long day, a long week, and between it all he had still managed to collect the papers and the materials that were strewn about the tables. He had still heaped this big load of extra work onto himself.

He opens his mouth and closes it again. The _Thank You_ doesn't make it out. The one thing his father had taught him that had still seems true after the War was that lip service was not to be a common practice in the Malfoy family.

So he turns back to the case file, skims the text, trying to make sense of all the cross-references and implications and the formal language that hails back to Chaucer, Gower and even a bit of Beowulf. The gist of the matter is that to help oneself to a peek at a pensieve without the owner's absolute permission constitutes a felony of a magnitude on a par with using the Imperius curse against someone or dosing him or her with veritaserum.

He knows that the verdict should give him hope, but it only makes him somewhat angry. Astoria had made sure and doubly sure that there would be no fair trial for him.

Another fifteen minutes pass. Paul comes by twice and is sent away unceremoniously. Potter doesn't have the time to care about the fact that they are the last two customers or that closing time had come and passed. Paul seems mystified, unsure as to why he isn't throwing the two leftover clients out instead of offering ever more 'Tea? Coffee? Something stronger?' Every time he is shooed away like a fly by Potter, he shuffles back behind his counter, stands there and blinks owlishly, mouth slightly open for a minute. Draco can't bring himself to feel sorry for him.

He is reading through the transcript of court proceedings, paying special attention to the judge's questions, when Potter speaks up.

"I'm going to need an assurance. From you." His tone is grave. Very deliberately, he rolls up the contract he had just been perusing. "Any sort of verbal but formal agreement will do."

Some harsh words about trust and unwarranted suspicions are hot on his tongue but he holds them back and swallows them back down. _If I were him, I wouldn't trust me either._

"Malfoy, put yourself in my position," Potter says, emphatically calm and determined, as if he had just read his thoughts. "What I'm doing here is not very reasonable, frankly. I told you to get a proper lawyer, but you refused. So you're stuck with me. I am definitely an improper lawyer. And I'm stuck with you because I'm not going to leave you hanging. I'm not." He tosses the contract onto the table with the other papers in a frustrated gesture.

"I just read your contract and the dissolution and this asinine plan of mine still looks like it could work. And when – if – we go through with it, it's quickly going to turn from 'not very reasonable' to 'ever so slightly felonious'. I'll be plotting to knowingly mislead the Ministry judiciary here."

Potter extends a hand, his left. "So please."

There is a tarnished coin in his palm, little flecks of silver peeking out between mottled brown and grey. The building that graces the obverse, some kind of castle, is a burnt ruin.

"I need you to promise that you won't make a retreat on me just because it's going to get personal and uncomfortable for you. There'll be too much at stake for me as well."

Draco holds his gaze for a moment, then looks back at the coin. He figures that pledging compliance and willingness should be something that is contemplated, mulled over, carefully deliberated for a long time.

He picks the coin from Potter's palm with his index and his thumb and closes his fist around it, lifts his hand to his mouth to blow across the back of his hand and finally places the bit, warm to the touch and so shiny and polished that it looks as if it were made of mercury, back in Potter's palm.

"How very seventeenth century, swearing on silver," he comments thinly as Potter carelessly slips the token into his jacket pocket.

"It's cheap, no-fuss and it works. It's adequate." Potter shrugs and retorts with a lifted eyebrow, "How very seventeenth century of you to know the drill, anyway." Potter shifts on his chair. Draco observes the change of posture and wonders if he does it consciously, and whether other people perceive it as intensely as he does.

"So. The plan is generally unchanged. I checked the spell again, the one I told you about. It works exactly as I remembered it, even if casting it will be a bit tricky. Once the implantation is complete, I will formally press charges against Boothe since he is currently the legal owner of the material we're trying to get back from him. That should stop Astoria's ideas of publication dead in its tracks. At the point of accusal I won't have to specify the nature of the material, and if we're really lucky, it won't even come up during the entire hearing." He pauses, then tilts his head. "Although I wouldn't bet on that. Boothe might be eager to bring it up."

Draco nods silently. Plutus seemed very much like the sort of person who would reveal, with great pomp and circumstance, that the footage in his possession was scandalously pornographic. It would serve very well to make the counterclaimant desperate in the judge's eyes. _Even more desperate, anyway._

"I will try my hardest to secure either Gardenia Higgs or Ransford Awarnach as the presiding judge. They are the most prudish and uptight of the entire bunch, and therefore the least likely to ask uncomfortable questions, let alone delve into sordid details, in case we do end up talking about the contents."

For a thrilling second of lunacy, Draco toys with the notion of persuading Potter to make the case more watertight by inviting him to sleep with him.

"If I'm lucky and we get Higgs, she might even exclude the public right away when she reads my name."

In his bed. Only in case someone asked him under veritaserum, "Have you ever slept with Draco Malfoy?"

"She's really not fond of reporters, and I tend to attract those."

_He would say 'Yes'. He would say 'Draco'._

He shakes his head quickly and holds his breath, grasping for sanity as discreetly as possible. The day has been long, and as tiredness is eating away at him, Potter's proximity begins to seep into his senses, befuddle them like alcohol, he can feel it.

"On the downside," Potter continues, unaware and business-like, "both of them are likely to harp on about the completeness of my supposed ownership of the spheres' content. They're both very big on fair allotment and to-each-their-own. I'm going to need to be able to answer a question like 'Are you positive that all the material contained in the spheres is yours? Can you confirm that?' in the affirmative or they will likely split ownership between me and Boothe and that would just not be enough, not to mention that the whole case might just collapse right under my feet if I fail to answer it." He gives him a piercing look and inhales audibly. "So to be on the safe side, I need the entirety of the material implanted. Is that all right with you?"

The palm of his right hand begins to sting as if he were holding a piece of live ember. Just where the silver coin had been. The pain snakes his way into the core of his hand, spreading to the tips of his fingers and accumulating in the joints, then spills over into his wrist when his hand is full to the brim.

_So that's what it was all about._ Draco clenches his teeth.

Potter just looks at him, unmoved. Waiting.

"How certain are you that this question will come up?" he presses from between his teeth and grabs his right wrist with his left hand as tightly as a tourniquet, as if that would stop the pain from spreading to his elbow.

"Too certain to take chances," is his grave answer.

Another long, agonizing moment passes before Draco complies, nods, exhaling a shuddering breath just as the pain subsides in an instant and without a trace. His stomach feels as if it were churning with a pint of off milk.

_In for a knut, in for a galleon. _He grimaces, trying to tell himself that it doesn't really matter whether Potter sees five minutes or five hours of dreams, but feels that it does. His throat is tight.

"Good," Potter says, voice and facial expression neutral to a fault.

"I told you, I only have that 'sample' they sent me," Draco reminds him, rasping, and fails to suppress a sniffle. "I can't say if it really is only an excerpt or the whole thing, since I don't remember- I don't recall the dreams I had in those four nights."

He does recall watching the recording. Right now, he does. There is a twinge in his groin that makes him turn his face away.

"Thanks to the contract you signed, that won't be a problem," Potter says and unrolls the parchment again. He puts his teacup onto the upper end to keep it from furling and points at several lines of writing with splayed fingers.

"Paragraph twenty three says that Boothes' are obligated to send both you and Astoria all relevant material 'upon enquiry', as specified in the subclauses seventeen A and seventeen B. Twenty three, subclause B, specifies that 'enquiry cannot be denied upon honour' which, as you probably know, is an ancient wizarding contract catchphrase that guarantees that if you demand something from the signatory party, within the confines of the contract, you will get it. They really have no choice, it's codex. Pacta sunt servanda and all that. Not to mention that I doubt they will think you could do them any harm with it."

_Boothe might even send it to me in a heart-shaped box with a silk ribbon on top._ When Draco closes his eyes he can see him, his gleeful sneer. 'Oh, I am _certain_ you need the material for purely therapeutic purposes, Mr Malfoy,' Boothe's voice rings out, dripping with mockery.

"So if you demand the entire contents of the morpheuspheres, they will give it to you. Or copies of it, anyway, which will do just fine for the implantation."

Many questions remain. What if Boothe broke the ancient wizarding contract clause? What if he simply refused, out of spite, out of wariness? What if he sent more samples but not everything? What if he stalled and sent the content too late for the deadline? The contract between Boothe and him had been terminated – emphatically terminated, even. It isn't worth anything any more, null and void. The confirmation for that is right in his briefcase, signed, stamped, legally attested.

Potter's whole plan is on shaky footing. Draco holds his tongue because it is the only plan he has.

"And lastly," Potter pushes on, "I know you have a deadline. So to speed the whole thing up and to buy me time to run some tests on how the implanted thoughts work and interact with, for example, veritaserum, I want to start with the sample you mentioned. As soon as possible. Tuesday next week should work. I suggest you just come over at half past six. We'll, uh, do it at my place."

He suppresses a cringe at the ambiguity, anticipates the pain and complies, nods, wishes he could simply be somewhere else, someone else, anyone and anywhere would do. He cannot imagine anyone else on this planet being in a circumstance quite like his – counting down the days until the humiliation would be perfect, thereby already being humiliated past the breaking point.

"You know what? Let's have a drink." Potter jolts him out of his thoughts with a slap on his arm with the back of his hand.

"I – what?"

Potter is already busy packing up the paperwork. " 'way I see it, we have some important stuff to talk about," he says as the tome of Wizarding Law shrinks visibly on its way into his book bag. He looks at Draco expectantly, waiting for him to catch on. When he doesn't, he supplies, "Scorpius," and rolls up parchments. "The kids in general. I figure you might have the need to talk. I know I would if I were you."

After some short moments of consideration, Draco also starts to move to clear the table. The papers wander back into his suitcase. He doesn't bother with the compartments this time. "Yes, actually," he says and feels the edge of the photo in the pouch of the case's inner lining with his fingertip.

"Good." He can hear the smile in his voice. "There's a dingy little place two streets down at the corner. Muggle, not heavily frequented, decent beer. Let me just de-confound Paul here..."

Whatever exactly he does to Mr Pointy Hair, it ends up with the Muggle throwing a tantrum – speaking gibberish, no less – and kicking them out like he should have more than two hours ago. Draco follows a pointedly unimpressed Potter out and then down the road. When Paul calls after them to 'fronk' their 'lanna prawn bowlorks', he can hear Potter chuckling under his breath. He focusses on the tickling feeling this sound causes – just the feeling, not venturing any deeper, not asking any follow-up questions – rather than brooding over his curiosity about Scorpius, or the heaviness of his feet and legs, or the uneasiness about the concessions he had just made, heavy on his stomach.

Potter leads the way silently.

/ **TBC**


	15. Chapter 14

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Hey everyone! I'm a bit early today because I'll spend the entire afternoon/evening/a good part of the night on the road. Winter vacations have come to an end, duty calls. *sighs*  
_

_Thanks to Ryuu88 and Morgana-sama for following!_

_Thank you for the review, La Argentina! I'm afraid things are only going to get worse for poor Draco before they get better. Also, you were asking for more? Here's more!  
_

_Please enjoy, y'all!_

/

**-/Chapter 14/-**

/

"Al's letters are all about Scorpius. He's like a fangirl. Scorpius this, Scorpius that... Apparently, your son is the proprietor of a certain broom maintenance set that has the entirety of the Slytherin first years silver-green with envy. Even Brice Parkinson doesn't have one that nice. Al told me _all_ about it at least five times, which is probably his idea of subtly hinting at possible birthday presents."

Draco bites his lip. It's ridiculously hard not to feel like a proud parent about something so trivial.

The pub Potter has led them to – The Brighton, maybe, or The Bristol? The Brixton? - is as dingy and empty as he had promised. The lights are dim, the air smells of tobacco smoke that had indelibly crept into the wood and the upholstery sometime during the era of Margaret Thatcher and Milicent Bagnold. The Muggles in the room – all four of them, all male, over fifty and seriously overweight, including the patron – are fixated on the television in the corner that shows a football game. None of them has taken any real note of the two strangers sitting by themselves on a tall, slim table, not even the patron when he put two tall glasses of dark brown beer in front of them. He had thrown the black suitcase near Draco's leg a lingering suspicious look, however, so Potter had spelled it tiny and light for him. It now rests in his inner coat pocket.

"Next year when they try out for the team, Al wrote he'll go for seeker, chaser _and_ keeper, just to be sure he'll make the team alongside Scorpius who he says is better than him on three out of seven days of the week – don't you tell Scorpius that, though, Al made me promise no one would ever, ever hear that confession."

Draco rolls his eyes and makes the zipping motion across his lips with his forefinger and thumb. Potter seems pleased.

"I guess if he doesn't make the cut, we'll have to move to the continent and send him to Beauxbatons instead." He sips his beer smiling to himself. "Exile would be the only viable option."

As delighting as it is to hear about his son, there is a sadness brewing inside. He looks into his glass as if the beverage might be able to tell him why exactly it is that Scorpius doesn't dare to tell him about a friendship that close.

He wonders if Astoria knows and the thought gives him a sour taste in his mouth.

"I'm sure he'll come around soon," Potter says as if he had read his thoughts. "Boys just are like that."

"Like what?" he asks without turning his face toward him. _Fearful of their fathers?_

"Worried for no good reason whatsoever," is his answer and his soothing tone makes it worse. "From what I gather, you haven't talked to him about our history at all. When he became friends with Al, Al most certainly told him. I mean... you, uhm. You _do_ know that Al has a pet ferret, right?" His eyes go a little wide. "I... I mean, you might have seen him in September, uh, on Al's cart..."

In response to his glowering look, Potter clears his throat and sips on his beer for long, solemn moments, smacks his lips and mumbles "His name's Marty Gwin," only to take another lengthy sip.

Draco grinds his teeth. "How wonderful," he presses out. "I didn't know they officially allow pets that are not cat, owl or toad now. Must have missed the notification." _The perks of being a Potter._

"Uh. Anyway." Potter regains his sobriety with some effort. "So when Al told him, it was the first time Scorpius ever heard of our past... well, feud, so he would naturally assume that there's something cooking. That you're still holding that grudge."

_How I wished it were that simple now. _"But even if that were so-"

"If you and I had become close friends at Hogwarts, would you have just gone and told your father?" Potter suddenly asks and Draco feels as if a bucket of ice had been dropped into his stomach. He turns to Potter whose eyes go wide as he realizes what he said.

"I am _not_ like my father," he insists through a tight throat.

"I'm sorry," Potter rushes to say.

"I couldn't - I have never-"

"I didn't mean to imply... I'm sorry."

Draco wipes the apologies away. "He should know that I would never- never be angry at him or even- even _punish_ him for making a friend. How did he even get that idea into his head...?" he mumbles more to himself than anything but Potter is close enough to pick up the words.

"I don't think he's afraid of punishment. I'd wager that this is more about your approval."

Potter looks at him as if expecting a contradiction. When he gets none, he tells him, "You know, James, my eldest, got himself a girlfriend just at the end of second year. They spent the holiday nights writing love letters back and forth so neither Ginny nor me actually noticed, even though Ginny later claimed that she had a feeling..." He illustrates said 'feeling' with a wriggling of his fingers and a loopy waving motion.

"James finally came out with it on Christmas of his third year. When I asked him why he had waited so long, he said that he was worried we might talk him out of it. He thought we might think he was too young to have a girlfriend, and a girlfriend who is one year older than himself, and that we wouldn't like her." He counts the reasons on his fingers, then shrugs. "Which is ridiculous seeing that Ginny, who is a year younger than me, had a crush on me when she was ten, and if I hadn't been a complete turnip when I was twelve, she and I probably would've been together earlier as well, so it would have been shameless to tell him no, and also, Siobhan is a wonderful girl, and anyway, we're not in the nineteenth century any more, sheesh."

A strange, out of place feeling blooms in his stomach as he hears Potter talk about his wife loving him. He sips his beverage and says nothing.

"Scorpius is simply unsure for no good reason at all. Just like James was. He's got it in his head that you might not like his friend as much as he does." Potter smiles a wry smile at him that makes him look ten years younger and old and wise at the same time. He shrugs again. "Just give him time, he'll come around eventually" with an almost comforting offhandedness.

In the moment of companionable silence, Draco imagines his son confessing to him, blue eyes full of uncertainty. Ludicrously, the imagined Draco bows down to the equally fictional, anxious Scorpius and says, "Son, you have nothing at all to worry about. After all, _I_ am the one who has to make a confession. You see, there is this man-"

He washes that scenario down with a long swig.

_Never._ This last thought leaves him crestfallen. Maybe a little- wistful.

"You know, of all the things that I never thought would happen, discussing kids with you over a beer in a Muggle pub was certainly in the top ten." Potter absent-mindedly starts fraying the corner of the beermat.

"Top five for me," Draco comments dryly, and Potter chuckles.

"The strange thing is, I think...," he says turns to look at him, and suddenly halts and knits his brows. The smile gradually vanishes from his face as he finishes, slower and slower, his voice getting quieter, "I could... get... used to this."

Potter ends up staring right into his eyes, his expression dark and serious and intent.

Draco suddenly empathises with every deer that has ever been caught in headlights.

"What?" He means to ask loudly and solidly. He wants it to sound like a demand.

It doesn't. It sounds like a plea.

He straightens his back and slides backwards on his chair to create some space between them because what space had been there before is suddenly so slim and narrow.

But Potter's upper body follows his. He is frowning and looking from one eye to the other rapidly, as if watching a tennis match he doesn't particularly like.

"Potter, what's going on?" He wishes he wouldn't sound so panicky to his own ears. Something inside of him is soaking in that green hue. "What are you-?"

"Follow my finger with your eyes," Potter commands by way of an answer and lets his outstretched index finger wander between them and right under his nose in a mighty distracting way that would've made him look at it without the instruction to do so.

Just as he becomes a bit irritated with the game, Potter suddenly lunges at his left arm going, "Let me see your scar."

Several things happen all at once.

Firstly, Draco wants to yell at him to keep his hands off of him, just in principle, because physical contact with anyone in public is something he isn't accustomed to and doesn't know how to handle. Much less when it's _him_.

Secondly, he becomes nervous about showing his scar in public – even if it's a Muggle public, even if the Muggles aren't even aware of them, and even though it's so faint that it's almost invisible, it's not something he wants people to see.

And thirdly, Potter reaches out, quick as a hawk, and hits that sensitive spot above his wrist with pinpoint accuracy.

All words get stuck in his throat, together with his breath.

Although the moment doesn't even last a second, it has Draco sweating all over.

Potter doesn't notice a thing.

"Just as I thought," he mumbles, voice serious, as he examines the scar the Dark Mark left on and under Draco's skin by prodding at it with his thumbs, pulling the skin tight with his fingers, not without care.

Some days, Draco completely forgets that it is there. Some days he feels the blemish reaching through the muscles and nerves, all the way down to the marrow of his bones, like a type of mould.

Today, all of a sudden, is one of the latter variety.

"See those white lines? Like spider veins – they're hard to spot because your skin is so light."

Indeed it is, it is pallid. Especially in direct contrast to Potter's skin. Potter is positively tanned in comparison. His hands feel rough in places, like leather. They are dry and strong and radiate heat.

Draco cannot pull his arm away. He looks at the spot and sees the marks Potter pointed out, like a fine silvery grain. He hasn't ever noticed them before. He doesn't tend to examine that spot too closely, ever.

"Uh-hu," he answers stupidly and then musters some breath for an almost steady "And what exactly do we learn f- from this observation?"

_Am I sick?_

_Even sicker than I thought I was in the first place?_

Potter lets go of his arm but a ghost of him is still holding on tightly.

"We've had five cases of this over the years that I know of," he explains. All the previous lightness had given way to sober professionalism, making him a different person. Meanwhile, Draco pulls down his sleeve, more forcefully than strictly necessary, and cradles his left arm against his body as if he could hide it away.

"I've seen one of it personally. Travers, Death Eater, in Azkaban, maybe a year and a half ago."

He has gotten up from his seat and puts on his coat and scarf rather hurriedly. Draco finds himself imitating him.

"It's some sort of- spontaneous autoimmune reaction to something from the Dark Mark scar tissue, we think. Gives you these spider veins, and makes your pupils dilate unevenly. Among other things."

"My pupils?" He resists the urge to reach up and vigorously rub his eyes.

"The dilation in your right eye is quite a bit slower than in the left. You wouldn't notice by yourself, your brain probably compensates for it. And your left iris is darker than the other, just two shades or so," Potter tells him. He slips money underneath the beer mat, quite a bit more than the beer is actually worth. "The good news is, there's a potion against it which helped in all cases I know of, without a hitch."

"And the bad news?" He throws the question after him since he is already halfway at the door. One of the Muggles that have flocked around the TV turns around and looks at him with a bewildered expression. "Oy, what bad news?" he asks with slurred speech and a thick accent. The others shush him.

Draco quickly follows Potter outside into the cold and then runs to catch up with him as he turns left and walks down the badly lit street at a rather brisk pace. The wind drives the rain into their faces. Potter doesn't even seem to notice it.

"You have to enlist at the Mystery Department to get that potion, and they'll want to prod you for a week or three before they give it to you," he answers, and before Draco can say anything – _Over my dead body_ comes to mind - , he adds, "But that is the _good_ bad news, actually, since we could- uhm, circumvent that."

"Circumvent?" Draco feels stupid parroting him but can't help it.

_We?  
_  
"St. Mungo's almost certainly has it in stock," Potter explains. "We could go there, try to sneak you in on emergency protocol." He tilts his head. "Ginny works there. She's on night shift for the whole week. I could persuade her."

The out of place feeling returns with a vengeance. He shoves it down strenuously to stay on the topic at hand.

"And the... _bad_ bad news?"

"Remember when I said 'spider veins and pupil dilation _among other things_'?"

There is suddenly a frantic quality to his voice, and Draco doesn't think it's because he's almost running.

"That scar wreaks havoc with people, with the body and the mind. The guy that I have seen, Travers – I should have made the connection so much earlier, dammit. He looked a mess, much like you, too little sleep, splitting headaches, completely different personality, shadow of is former self- He-" The next sentence leaves his mouth in a rush, not much louder than a whisper. Draco only catches it because the words carry on the wind. "He ended up ripping the nails from his own fingers with his teeth. So..."

They stop at a crossroad.

As the words _completely different personality_ sink in, all he can think is 'So maybe it's not _me_' and his pulse and his thoughts are racing all at once.

Potter looks him up and down sideways with worry, as if he might start to mutilate himself any second. "Let's just get you to hospital post-haste, all right?" he suggests unsmilingly and hails a cab.

/ **TBC**

_The ferret idea is, of course, shamelessly inspired by that hilarious tumblr post by always-riddikulus (which ff net doesn't allow me to link. *miffedface*). It starts with "Forgive me, I don't recall **ferrets** being on the list of acceptable creatures to bring to Hogwarts" and ends with "That moment when Harry's son turns into Malfoy". Go google it, it's worth it._


	16. Chapter 15

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Thank you for another review, La Argentina! I totally understand the Ginny-hate. Right there with you :D_

_Sorry for being late, ff dot net didn't let me in to the "Manage Stories" section yesterday._

/

**-/Chapter 15/-**

/

The smell reminds him of the funeral hall in Wiltshire. Even though he had last been in that building thirteen years ago, he still sometimes feels as if there was a piece of that place stuck on him somewhere, emitting that dead people odour from time to time so he would never forget it. A farewell gift from father perhaps.

He tries breathing through his mouth instead for a few minutes, until it starts to feel as if he is sucking big chunks of this new kind of horror into himself, unfiltered.

When Potter finally comes to collect him, he is sure that he has been infected thoroughly with St Mungonitis. Especially with a body and mind as weak as his right now – it becomes clear to him again when he realizes that he is jittery and warm simply from seeing Potter walk toward him – he fears that it might become a chronic affliction.

"Looks like we'll just go barging in and hope for the best. Ginny's still on duty somewhere on third floor."

He follows in Potter's wake up the stairs and refuses to make eye contact with anyone of the very few people coming their way. The floor squeaks under the soles of his shoes.

"Just let me do the talking. I'll handle her."

Which strikes Draco as an odd thing to say, but his head is so full and tired that he can't hold on to his own thoughts. He nods even though Potter can't see him.

"Wait here," he instructs when they arrive on third floor. Draco takes shelter behind a glass door from where he can see Weasley standing at the reception desk, studying a clipboard and listening to the mediwitch behind the desk at the same time. When she nods at something the other mediwitch said, her very reasonable ponytail bobs up and down.

No matter how he tries, he cannot help but watch. Potter approaches his wife and says her name, gets her to notice him. She turns around to face him.

He could swear he sees Weasley's shoulders sag a fraction of an inch.

The other witch gives the couple before her a long look and excuses herself. Weasley nods at her again which sends her hair swaying.

There are no hugs and no touches. No kisses on the cheek as he had- anticipated.

Dreaded?

_Stupid, stupid.  
_  
Before he can be caught staring, he turns away reluctantly.

The whole scene looks so unexpectedly, strangely familiar. He just doesn't remember who-

Long minutes go by. The low hum of magic all around, the thick, unsavoury air and the general hush make him so drowsy that he flinches back into wakefulness when someone addresses him.

"Malfoy."

Her voice is grim, as is her face. There is a hard line around her mouth that tells him that she didn't like saying his name whatsoever. It reminds him so much of Astoria spitting 'You little toad' at him that he worries Potter might have told her about his dreams. He glances at him as he feels his stomach sink. The glance is inconclusive, though. Potter's face is blank.

"Weasley," he answers, slightly less darkly.

"Well. You _do_ look like hell," she says, apparently confirming something Potter had said to her before, and crosses her arms in front of her.

"Is that a professional diagnosis?" It was intended as a quip but he sounds too weak.

"I can embellish it with some Latin-based technical terms, make it sound more important if you like. But the diagnosis itself won't change significantly, I'm afraid." Her tone betrays that she has made this joke several times before, and it hadn't even been funny the first time around. She sighs.

"Alright, anyway. I do declare that you could need my help urgently, and you're on the premise, which means that you have the unalienable right to assistance." Her eyes say 'Lucky me' as she heaves the sigh of an overworked, underpaid and generally discontented mediwitch. "Do you avail yourself of this right?"

"Uhm." He can't help another glance at Potter who is standing behind her – at a considerable distance, as if he were keeping a safety clearance. His face is still unreadable, however. "Yes?" he finally answers in tone that clearly says _What am I signing up for here?_

"Well, then." Instead of addressing the implied question, she turns around and walks ahead – brushes past her husband without a glance – toward and then past the counter and down the corridor, never once looking back at him.

"Sorry about that," Potter says when she is out of hearing range. His voice is as neutral as his face.

He isn't sure at all why Potter would apologise now. Just like his wife, he doesn't offer any explanation, though, merely motions with his hand and says, "I think you should follow her."

He does before she vanishes around a corner, biting back the burning questions. Potter stays behind.

/

"Breathe in," she orders. He inhales exaggeratedly.

In the silence of the unoccupied room 419, spontaneously converted from a normal hospital room – big enough for at least four beds – to an examination room with a patient bench, folding privacy screen and all, he thinks he can hear his heartbeat, a mighty drumming noise.

She checks his pulse, ears, tongue and throat, eye-hand- coordination and even knee reflexes before proceeding first to the eyes and then to the patch of skin on his left forearm, forever marred by a now almost invisible stain. Invisible to the eye, at least.

"The outward symptoms match the precedents. The irregular dilation of the pupils, colouration, the spider veins around the scar tissue." Immersed in the inspection of the scar as she is, she slips into professionalism, just like her husband did some hours ago, transforming into another person. Her voice doesn't sound quite as hostile any more. "You may have experienced unusual bodily or even magical reactions lately."

He focusses on breathing evenly. "Such as?" _Other than sudden tendencies towards self-inflicted violence. _Which, somewhat ironically, is the one thing he cannot remember even considering.

_Unless confiding in Potter counts._

_Sitting close to him probably does._

She prods the skin that is shot through with those faint silvery lines, all the while missing the spot her husband found at the very first try.

"Any kind, really. The five people we had the chance to observe reported several different and very diverse phenomena. Headaches, toothaches, visual disturbances, numbness of the limbs, frequent sneezing, sudden appetite for pickled gherkins, blocked or altered flow of magic, clocks stopping, memory loss, fevers, sudden appeal to animals such as cats and dogs, heightened sense of smell, clairvoyance, electrical appliances exploding during usage, vertigo, unusual and aggressive aversion to furniture..." She trails off and eventually looks up from his arm. "That sort of thing."

"Fatigue," he says. Once she breaks eye contact, he continues, "Even though I slept ten, twelve hours on end. Vertigo. Occasionally, my vision was impaired." _Blindness. Figurative. _He ponders a second. "Ageusia." _Mental indolence._ "Headaches." _Lack of sane judgement._ "Nightmares." _Even though I could never recall them – which is also the scar's fault, I suppose._ He clears his throat after the last one.

_And perversion._

_Maybe it's not _me_. _He presses his lips together.

"Not unusual," Weasley comments drily. "Whatever that means with a sample size of five, I suppose." She sits up from her hunched-over position and allows him to pull the sleeve down again. "Anything else?"

"Would it be-" He clears his throat. "Could it be possible that the scar affects the way I recall- my, uh, dreams?"

"Whether or not one can recall one's dreams depends mostly on which phase of sleep you woke up in. We have observed that the scar may influence sleep phases as well as dream content... so yes. Could be possible." She pauses. "Anything else?"

When he is done considering whether or not to tell her anything more, he realizes that his silence has been an unquestionable answer already anyway. Weasley looks at him patiently and evenly.

He resists the urge to whisper when he finally asks, "This conversation- it is confidential, correct?"

She answers in the affirmative. "Even if I wanted to, I couldn't reveal what you're telling me to anyone who didn't need to know unless you gave me permission. I work under oath." She pauses a split second. "It's something sexual, isn't it?"

Bashful heat immediately worms its way to his cheeks. He wonders if he just is an obvious person, or if women in general just read him easily.

"When people beat around the bush like that, it's always something sexual," Weasley declares and gets up from her chair, mercifully turning away from him. "With all the things this scar can do to you, heightened or unusual urges, performance problems, inappetence and just about everything in between are well within the bounds of possibility."

"Unusual- as in..." He prompts. The drumming noise in his chest is a fluttering staccato now.

"That depends," Weasley answers offhandedly and refuses to say anything else.

When he doesn't find another way of phrasing his concern without giving himself away, he decides to address the second step instead.

"And are there...," he starts, then changes his mind. "Did any of my predecessors experience any- lasting effects, even after taking the potion?"

"One vowed to never eat pickled gherkin again for the rest of his life," she says with half a shrug. "The potion has a track record of one hundred percent so far, that's all I can say. Even though these kinds of statements are hard to make with a sample group that small and an affliction that mysterious. Could you take off your shoes and socks, please? Since you're officially an emergency case, I'll have to run the rest of the standard procedure and it works better when you're earthed."

He remembers the time when he would have been unwilling to be barefooted in front of someone else. Being barefooted meant being vulnerable. He asks himself if he had a complete change of mindset due to everything that happened recently, or if this is merely due to his being vulnerable with or without shoes.

While Draco does as he is bidden, she moves through the drawers of a trolley she brought in with her with easy purposefulness and carries on.

"We still have no idea exactly how the residue from the Dark Mark causes the various problems you have. Could be autoimmune, could be viral, could be magical, could be something completely different. Stand up, please. Likewise, we have no idea what _activates_ it, for wont of a better word. The first case was about five years ago, second came several months after that. Lift yours arms. Number three was maybe two years ago, four and five were last year. Everyone is so very different, with so little in common." She hesitates and then says, with some hesitation, "Except, of course, that you were all Death Eater scum."

For some reason, when she says it, it is completely different from how Astoria uses the expression. There is a straightforwardness in her voice that his wife never had. Unlike Astoria, he is almost certain that Weasley doesn't even mean to hurt him, not primarily anyway. Rather, it sounded like she vocalised it for herself.

Oddly, Draco finds himself merely glad that her reasons for despising him lie so far in the past. That they aren't contemporary and don't have to do with his son making friends with her son.

Or with himself lusting after her spouse.

_Maybe it's not me._

Since he doesn't know how to respond to that – he suspects that he isn't supposed to say anything anyway – he falls silent and observes her instructions wordlessly.

She performs several spells he has never heard of. They tickle and prod him in this place and that. It feels quite awful – they faithfully imitate the sensation of rubber-gloved hands and cold bits of metal on his skin – but he guesses that was what was meant with 'availing himself of these rights' and takes it without comment.

Out of the blue, he receives a hard jab against his stomach. A small 'ouff' flies from his mouth.

Weasley looks at him with a creased forehead and repeats the spell once she has made sure that it hadn't been too awful. The effect is the same, although Draco is prepared this time.

"That's not supposed to happen," she mumbles as if to herself. "Can you lift your shirt for me, please?"

He has never been self-conscious of his stomach before. Maybe, he reasons, that was because he never had to show it to anyone.

"I'm going to use the diagnostic spell again, okay?"

He nods and pushes his breath against his diaphragm. It feels as if all the air in his abdomen suddenly contracts and solidifies to a spiky, solid mass for a split second. The pain sizzles away quickly, like a single spark.

When Weasley asks him where it hurts the most, he sets his index to a point two inches north of his navel.

"I'm afraid I'll have to run several more spells," she says, frowning, "so just hold still for me." He sees her mouthing a 'What is this?' to herself.

As she keeps firing spells he has never heard of at him that crawl over and then under his skin, he looks up to the room's ceiling and his mind drifts.

He tries to remember how it feels like to be not tired, not sapless, how his thoughts feel like when they're not reeling. How it is like to be in control instead of oscillating erratically between weariness and anxiety. He imagines getting a footing again after slipping and sliding with every step for so long.

He asks himself whether his- _unusual urges_ are not his own, but the scar's making.

_Maybe the fault doesn't lie with me._ A shivery and feverish feeling rises in his chest. _Maybe I'm not really broken at all._

He asks himself whether Potter is still waiting outside.

/

"Personally, I've never seen this on a fully conscious person."

Weasley explains everything to him calmly, with an aloofness she indubitably acquired over the years of working in a job that requires her to break bad news to desperate, distraught, mentally unstable people.

For the second time in a week, he finds himself being talked to like a little child or a mad person.

"We normally use this on people in a vigilant coma, to glean some feasible information on their mental state."

She is the one who tells people if they are flying or falling, Draco realizes. _It's her goddamn job._

Also, he feels that he is rapidly inching closer to truly becoming the mad person, and that he is getting used to being talked to like that.

"I didn't think the spell could physically be applied to someone who is, uhm. Lucid." She mulls it over, then tilts her head. "Then again, the scar might have affected you in such a way that..."

She lets the sentence hang. Presumably, what she meant to say would have been quite hurtful, something along the lines of _that you were weak enough for someone to come along and fuck you over this way_.

Claustellum. That's what it was called, that feeling like a warm stone Layla put into him the day of the contract-signing. The stinging pain in his belly he had felt at the end of almost every session with her.

He had always thought that it was the general tension, or the confessions, or maybe the damn tea that had upset his stomach.

A keyhole. A hole through which she could peep into him and access the core of his mind, just like she had _told him to his face_ she would, a device to make him compliant and open. The lock to the door of the closet that held his army of skeletons. Of course, she had held the key, and she had turned it and made him spill.

_You are the most cautious person I've ever met, Mr Malfoy._

Wanting to throw one's head back and howl with laughter is a sign of madness, isn't it?

"Does it make sense to ask you who did this to you?" Weasley ventures quietly. Perhaps she knew him just well enough, or perhaps she merely deduced from the way the colour palpably drained from his face that, even though he hadn't been in a coma when the spell was put in place and then put to work, he hadn't really known what had been done to him.

He swallows past a hard knot in his throat. There is a bitter taste in is mouth. His back is very straight. "Is there a way to dismantle it?"

"Despite the fact that this sort of spell is supposed to lift itself just by you being awake...Yes, there is," Weasley says. "Ideally, the person who put it there should be the one to break it again."

He looks at her, and she lowers her eyes. "Someone else would also be able to do it, but it might get ugly."

_Don't worry_, he wants to say. _It already is as ugly as it can be_.

And still the woman dances in her green dress, and every time she smiles her beautiful smile over the rim of the wine glass or the dainty jasmine tea cup he knows she's really laughing at him, knows that this shouldn't hurt him the way it does.

Bit by bit, every single word he said and every single thing he did since the day he signed the contract decays into shame. Into involuntary divulgences.

He might as well have run around dosed with veritaserum all this time, stark naked, with his life's story tattooed onto his sallow skin for everyone to read like a vulgar, tasteless Prophet column.

And then he had spread himself under Potter's nose, and made Potter read it.

/ **TBC**

_I won't be home or anywhere near a computer on Saturday, so I'll post two chapters at once Friday afternoon. Just a heads-up._


	17. Chapter 16

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Due to technical difficulties, I posted chapter 15 earlier today (instead of yesterday evening). Have you read that one already?_

_Thanks to Sliding Shine for following!_

_I'm sorry that this one is so short. I hope you'll enjoy it anyway.  
_

/

**-/Chapter 16/-**

/

"Okay. You're going to stay here for the night," Weasley steps into the descending wave of self-loathing with unexpected resoluteness. "I will go prepare the potion for the scar and the spell to undo the claustellum. It'll take an hour at least. I suggest you make yourself at home. You can wash and change in the rest room, the next door to the left. Everything you might need you can find in the shelf by the sink."

With a flick of her wand, the sparse furniture changes back into the hospital bed and the bedside table and the rickety-looking wooden chair. Strangely, there is considerable comfort in the sight of them, as well as in Weasley's quiet and likewise functional instructions that don't allow for contradiction.

"If you need anything else in the meantime, you can call for Grace or Bernard, both of them should be out front by the counter. But it'd save me a world of bother if you wouldn't, really."

He doesn't question it. He's not keen on being taken note of by Grace or Bernard anyway.

"I'll send Harry in," she says with a slight upward inflection.

So he _did_ wait outside. His stupid heart leaps.

"I could- brief him. If you want. About the general things, I mean." There is a pause. "He seemed concerned."

He nods, as an answer to the implied question, and as an assentation to her offer. She nods back and leaves.

He finds himself agreeing with her assessment. Potter _had_ seemed concerned. Theoretically, he knows that it's nothing but the saviour complex.

Instead of plucking his fingernails – the urge is there, in his belly, though – he imagines that it isn't, that Potter is truly worried about him, that he would later sit by his bedside and stay the night and before it can get any worse, Draco takes an ice cold shower until his skin has a violet hue.

_Ironic_, he thinks as he puts the hospital nightgown on, a piece of clothing that is basically a large white paper bag, cut open lengthwise from the hole for the head down to the thigh, with two ends of lace he could tie to a bow in the back of his neck that were all that preserved his dignity. _What is left of it anyway._

Ironic that the day should end exactly the way it started – _thoughts about Harry Potter and freezing showers._

Almost two hours later he is standing at his window looking out. The lights are out in the room behind him, but the luminescence from behind the glass dispel the dark anyway. The scenery is magical. Fake, that is. He is fairly certain that there are no meadows in central London, and that the city is not located on the foot of a picturesque mountain range either. More than anything, the stars glittering above in unveiled multitudes give the forgery away. Still, it is nicer than the real view.

There is a knock on the door which he doesn't bother to answer.

After a minute, Potter comes in anyway. Draco knows it's him without turning around – Weasley wouldn't knock, and no one else would knock on the door to a room that was supposed to be empty.

"She told me," is all he says at first. The awkward silence lets him know that either Potter's eyes are still getting used to the dimness or that he had arrived at the same conclusion as him.

Draco wonders if he feels like some sort of unwitting rapist now, like someone who had inadvertently taken advantage of a person who hadn't been in their right mind.

"Look, I, uh." He hears Potter's footsteps on the linoleum. "I made a vowing knot."

Draco grimaces. For a moment there he had almost forgotten that Potter was raised by Muggles. Otherwise he would know that vowing knots – knots made into everything from handkerchiefs to shoelaces to cherry stems, infused with little promises that had to be kept as long as the knot, given to the one the promise was made to, was still tied – were for little children under the age of seven. The vows made with them dealt with being best friends forever, always sharing chocolate frogs and never-ever-ever telling Mrs Goyle how her priceless, irreparable Ming vase had broken.

"I pledge that, once all of this is over, once Astoria and Boothe have no power over you any more, you can take the implanted thoughts from me as well, without exception."

Draco winces inwardly. He had tried so hard to repress all that. The implantation, it is still, firmly and inevitably, on the schedule. Great thing to have Potter reminding him that this marathon is far from over even though his soles are already raw.

"Should you want to, you can obliviate the entirety of what you told me at our meetings at the café, and everything in regards to your person. This way, the integrity of your privacy would be restored."

Spoken like a true wizards' contract. Draco finds himself endlessly fed up with contracts these days.

"Malfoy, I am sorry. This- What she did to you is appalling, and I made it so much worse."

Draco wonders if it makes sense to be both relieved and angry at the omission of a name.

As Potter gets started on a rant of self-reproach - "I should have known that something was wrong. I know we haven't seen each other in years, but I should've known you well enough. I should have stopped you somehow from pouring your heart out to me like that" - Draco turns around and grabs the strip of fabric Potter had placed on the bed. The ragged edges tell him that he ripped it off a piece of clothing, probably from the sleeve or the seam of his shirt.

Draco grabs the strip by the ends and pulls the loose knot tight. "This knot, your vow, forever from now," he intones, just like he did many, many years ago when he pulled Gregory Goyle's hanky knot tight to seal a deal, only with more determination, so Potter will shut up, just _shut up_.

Unlike his five year old self to whom, disappointingly, nothing at all had happened, Draco gets a shock that sizzles through his fingers to his elbows and makes all the hairs on his arms stand up. For some reason, the smell of burnt resin is in his nose. The knotted cloth in his hands seems warm to the touch, as if it were about to burst into flame any second.

He puts it onto the night stand tentatively, suddenly not sure if vowing knots are for kids after all.

Potter turns away for which he is grateful. All at once he is shivering in his paper dress, and very aware of his bare knees, calves and feet sticking out at the end.

"Ginny tells me you'll be here until tomorrow noon at least. Is there anyone... uhm."

_No, there is no one at home you could contact for me,_ Draco thinks.

"Magnus knows his way around the shop. He'll be fine without me." In the silence that ensues he figures that he should offer to make Magnus managing partner sometime. He has been running the shop practically by himself all this time, he is too valuable to let him go anywhere.

"Do you need anything?"

The way he asks almost sounds like he knows very well that it is quite an unfair question.

"You are cordially invited to stay and hold my hand, Potter," he drawls in reply, with a rising tone toward the end so it sounds like a joke instead of the answer it is.

Potter sighs. "I'll see you tomorrow, then." He even gives him several long moments to dissent – _as if I could afford to_, Draco thinks and clenches his jaw – before he leaves, closing the door almost soundlessly behind him.

When he is already gone for several minutes, Draco replies, "I hope you won't."

He sits down on the edge of the bed and makes a wish upon those fake stars that, come sunrise, all these silly pounding heartbeats and the surfacing memories of Potter and himself melting into one another and the yearning in his chest would be over, done, gone. Rejected like a foreign organ that had been put into him without his knowledge, against his will and his nature.

The Draco Malfoy of tomorrow would have left behind the unappealing picture of misery of tonight, and Potter, despite his parting words, would never see _that_ _him_ again.

Or so he wishes.

True to the power of wish-making, in the nine hours after Weasley administers the potions and the spells – telling him again that 'this isn't going to be pretty' – to dissolve the claustellum and break the scar's hold of him, he does feel like dying. His sweat drenches the paper bag he is wearing, his burning skin is crawling and twitching. The uncontrollable tremor in his right hand and the lack of an adequate cutting tool is all that keeps him from chopping his left arm off below the elbow, and carving out his boiling guts in the next step.

He clenches his unruly fingers into the thin, cold hospital bed sheet and wishes Potter had stayed to hold his goddamn hand.

/ **TBC**


	18. Chapter 17

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Thanks to La Argentina again for much-appreciated feedback!_

_Revelations ahead. Please enjoy!_

/

**-/Chapter 17/-**

/

_'Ginny left me a message saying you had _

_already checked out, that everything was _

_in order although your night was rough, _

_and that you wanted to head home to rest.'_

True enough. She had virtually thrown him out at nine-thirty after two more check-ups that had confirmed the efficacy of the treatment. Her face had looked almost as haggard as the pale, unshaven corpse in the mirror that had stared at him out of bloodshot eyes, sunken deep into darkened, almost bruised-looking sockets. She had let him know that she had been working seventeen hours straight, and the last eight had been exclusively because of him.

When she made a remark about how Potter wouldn't come to see him any time soon - "Harry's at the Ministry until at least five p.m. for a meeting or something." - Draco's last resistance crumbled and he let himself be floo'ed home.

Without missing a beat and without any comment, Milly had made his bed and some hot milk with honey in a touching display of servile affection, but he hadn't even touched the glass. He also hadn't taken off his trousers or his shirt, and the shoes had just barely come off. He had fallen into bed and been asleep as soon as his head had touched the pillow.

It had been pitch dark when he woke again. The overwhelming sense of disorientation had quickly given way to a deep sense of relief.

He was well rested. His body was thrumming with an energy he hadn't felt in a long, long time. He felt strong and alert and _good_. For once his head was pain-free, the vice grip loosened.

Something had worked. It had made him sleep through the entire day which had him famished and thirsty, but it had worked.

The owl waiting on the window sill had ticked its beak against the glass once he started stirring, like a polite little knock, even though the bird must have been waiting for hours.

Potter's message consists of five scribbled lines.

_'Remember the plan'_ the last one reads.

He pushes the specifics of said plan to the back of his mind for now and sits down to write the letter to Boothe. Around four thirty, just as the impenetrable darkness gives way to a shade of dark blue and grey, the draft is sufficient. Just under one hour later, he sends his meanest Great Horned, Ashurbanipal, to London, the demanding letter tied to the owl's leg.

He goes and tips away the glass of milk Milly had set up for him, then sits down in front of the TV with a sandwich from the fridge and a large bottle of water and zaps through the channels which he hates when Scorpius does it.

For the first time in months, he is at work early. He cleans up meticulously, gets the bookkeeping in order and unlocks the door for Magnus who comes in for Sunday work at eight thirty sharp. His clerk gives him a short, calculating look, then flashes him an equally measured smile. He comments neither on his absence, nor on the fact that several flasks of fairly potent painkillers and sedatives have vanished from the shelves and the accounts some time ago. Draco supposes that he should really make him managing partner soon.

They fall back into their old working pattern effortlessly. There is a lot of work to do. No Ministry minions come around even though Draco almost finds himself wishing they would, just because he feels that he could weather it with ease today.

Just before four p.m., tiredness overcomes him. It is the normal, healthy kind, the kind everyone would feel after subjecting one's just recently recuperating body to fourteen stressful hours of work. So he leaves the closing-up to Magnus again and apparates home – where no message from Boothe is waiting for him – has himself a dinner with meat and vegetables and a glass of beer, a long, hot bath and is in bed before seven.

Sleep comes easily, just comes and pulls his exhausted body under, and he plunges into it because there is nothing to fear, nothing to dread, nothing at all-

He awakes with a start in the middle of the night. As if he were five years old again he scrambles for the light switch to dispel the suffocating darkness.

His infantile self was scared of things _under _the bed.

Draco finds himself thrown into a state of panic by things _in_ the bed. He could have sworn there was somebody there. Next to him. He could feel the movement, the touch.

It felt real. _He _felt real, alive, warm.

But there is no one there.

As his heart rate and breathing normalize, he slowly manages to make sense of it all. He remembers Weasley's answer and figures that, now that the impenetrable veil that used to separate the sleeping and the waking part of his existence has been lifted from his mind, he can simply recall his dream again. A dream so vivid that it bled through into his waking.

And it is familiar. Awfully familiar.

The sights, the sounds, they are still the same. Blurry, chaotic, incoherent snatches, but definitely the same.

He is in his robe and shoes before he can even think it through and apparates to St Mungo's. The lonely young woman at the reception doesn't deserve to be yelled at, he knows, but he does it anyway, demanding Healer Weasley.

"I _know_ she is on night shift, I_ know_ she is here right now, so tell her I'm-"

"Malfoy!" Her tone is severe and the displeased scowl is frightening.

Not as frightening as the panic throwing sparks in his skull. He could _feel_ it, he almost still does.

"Weasley, thank Merlin," he grumbles and rather roughly grabs her elbow to pull her to the side, away from the cowed, pale-faced receptionist apologizing to Weasley. "I need to take the potion again. It didn't work."

"What?" She pulls her arm away with a jerk. "What the blazes are you on about? Malfoy, calm down."

"I can't!" He doesn't want to shout. People are watching. "_They're still there_!"

"Okay, look. Come with me, just come-"

He allows her to pull him into an empty staff room, brightly lit with comfy-looking chairs strewn about, a kitchenette and a table with a bowl of cookies on it. She closes the door and spells it soundproof.

"Are you out of your mind?" she snarls at him when the spell is done. "I did you a favour – many favours, actually, because it is not exactly easy go get a hold of that potion without the entire Ministry knowing it right away, believe me – and you storm in here, bawling about like that – are you actively trying to cost me my job and my license?!"

Any other day, Draco might have been impressed by her intensity, but not right now. Right now, he is trying not to have a nervous breakdown, so he snarls back at her.

"And a _grand_ favour it was. Your perfect potion missed a goddamn spot. They're still there," he hears himself hissing and bores his index finger into his temple. "Just like before. You said there would be no lasting effects. You said-"

"First of all, I said no such thing," Weasley resolutely cuts him off, her voice like a chopping knife. "I told you that the sample group is too small to make any clear statements. And secondly, what on earth are you talking about? Who are '_they_'?" She crosses her arms in front of her chest in a defensive gesture. "Malfoy, are you hearing voices? In your head?"

_Only one voice. _It says _Yes_. It says _Draco_.

"You said that _unusual urges_ were caused by the scar," he reproaches her, voice spiralling out of control. "They're still there, your potion failed. I'll need to do it again-"

"Malfoy. Malfoy, stop," she interrupts him again, suddenly all mollifying. "Have a seat. Sit down, please. Sit down."

She repeats it until he finally relents. The chair looks comfier than it actually is.

Once he is seated, she goes through the motions again. Pulse, ears, tongue and throat, eye-hand- coordination, knee reflexes, eyes and his left forearm. She comments on her results all the while as if there were a minute taker present, and Draco assumes that she does it out of habit, or to keep him from talking, or to buy herself some time _because she doesn't know how to help you. She cannot do anything against it_. He waits with clenched teeth until she is done.

"I don't know what to tell you," she finally sighs, confirming his dark premonitions. "All the signs are in accordance with the expectations. Pupil dilation and colour are back to normal, the spider veins are gone, the scar is now a cold spot. It's just like it was with the other five. You seem generally better rested than two days ago, or you wouldn't have the energy for a temper tantrum like that. And the claustellum is also gone or you'd have felt pain again when I did the diagnostic spell." She makes a self-satisfied face that exudes no joy whatsoever. "Congratulations, you're healed."

"But they're- they're still there." His heart is in his throat.

Weasley regards him silently for a long moment and eventually pulls over a chair for herself, puts it right in front of him and sits.

"Malfoy, tell me honestly. These _urges_ you speak of-" His heart sinks from his throat into his stomach. As a precaution he holds his breath and seals his lips tightly. Her face is very serious as she goes on, "Do they have to do – even remotely to do – with paedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality..."

"Merlin, no. No," he bursts out and shudders. "No."

"Non-consensual sexual activities of any kind?"

"No." Not in that sense, really. "No."

She regards him for a long moment, searching his face for signs of dishonesty but finding none. "In that case, there _is_ no real problem." She gets up again with a force. "Other than those, no urge is truly problematic. I suggest you learn to live with yours. You know, bearing one's cross and all that."

"But I can't-" he starts, but she cuts him off again.

"You'll have to. Because from what I can tell you, right here and now, the scar didn't have anything to do with them at all to begin with." She opens up her hands. "They're just _you_."

A leaden calm comes over him, accompanied by a feeling he remembers well. The last time he encountered it, Plutus Boothe had looked at him and asked, "You're not contesting the authenticity of the product, are you?"

He grasps his thighs and kneads them and feels his pulse boom through his whole body, fast, but deep and steady-going.

_They're just _me_._

Something inside collapses with a quiet sigh. Paradoxically, it feels almost like relief.

Taking advantage of his silence, Weasley goes on, "As I said, no urge is truly problematic. There are potions and spells to keep just about everything undesirable in check. I'll also happily refer you to various self-help groups, if you want to," she tells him rather curtly.

"Now that we're done with this, can you please just leave? I still have work to do for the next-" She checks her watch. "Two and a half hours."

She watches him expectantly as he gets up from his chair, as if she were just waiting for him to either faint on the spot or go spare. He is somewhat surprised that his legs actually carry him.

Something occurs to him. "This conversation was confident as well, yes?"

"Actually, no," she says levelly, "since we didn't officially make a patient arrangement, I'm not bound by the oath for this exchange."

His breath catches. "But you won't tell your-" He pushes the word. "Husband."

She lifts an eyebrow. "Why would I?" Suddenly, her mien darkens and she thrusts out her chin defiantly. "He and I are not on speaking terms right now."

Her eyes betray a supressed anger that slowly and noticeably bubbles to the surface even as he turns his face away and makes a show of attempting to put his rumpled clothes in order.

Her words are mumbled out between clenched teeth and she is also turning away and busying herself with something, anything, but he catches most of it anyway.

"... can't just dump Lily at my parents' when he feels like it. ... agreed on this only two months ago ... doing it again... _Just this once, Ginny. It's an exception, a special_... Morrigan, curse this man."

No hugs, no kisses, no physical contact at all. The sagging of the shoulders and the distance. He hadn't imagined it.

Potter never once called her 'my wife', always merely 'Ginny', and the way he said "I'll handle her"...

Neither of them wears a ring.

Weasley and Potter standing there with two arm lengths and cold air between them- they had reminded him of himself and Astoria.

A broken-up couple.

His heart wanders back up to his throat despite himself. He can feel it pounding there when he buttons and straightens his shirt collar.

Weasley briskly sends him home without another word but with an icy glare that follows him all the way outside the door. He hopes that, should he ever need to go to St. Mungo's again, his next visit will be well outside of her working hours.

He stays awake for the night with Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung blaring from the gramophone Astoria's father had given him as a present at the seventh anniversary of their wedding. Normally, the violins, the horns, the trombones and the thundering timpani make it impossible for him to think, as if they could fix his thoughts in place, like a mighty wind that holds down all the blades of grass with ease.

Tonight, his thoughts stray regardless of the noise and inevitably circle around the faint shred of memory of his latest dream and around the things he learnt from Ginny Weasley, and back again. Round and round, until he is sick and tired of how his imagination that, like a starved, hunger-crazed tiger, pounces and feeds on the possibility that Potter is not in a stable relationship with Weasley any more, and on those long looks Potter had given him and on how close they had sat at the pub, as if any of that _meant_ anything. Sick of how clearly he can see him before his mind's eye, tired of how definite and precise his intentions are emerging now, crystal clear like high definition photos – _they're just you, they're just you_ as a chorus in the background – until he has had enough of thinking itself.

/ **TBC**


	19. Chapter 18

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_ Re:La Argentina: Yeah, aren't we just awful people? Three underage kids between them, but we're still glad they split :D I guess it's poor Ginny's fate to be hated in this genre. We have to end the male/female relationship *somehow*, sooo... death or divorce. There's no alternative. (In the three fanfictions I wrote so far, she was killed once, cheated on Harry the second time, and in this third performance they just slowly grew apart, I guess. Huh, I'm going __progressively_ softer on her.)  


_Alright folks, things are coming to a point now. I hope you like a bossy Harry Potter._ _Please enjoy!_

/

**-/Chapter 18/-**

/

Tuesday comes too fast, and then passes too fast. He immerses himself in his work but he has to come up for air from time to time and every time he does, all he can think about is that vial on the desk of his bedroom. It is an heirloom from his mother's mother and had spent uncountable years forgotten and unused in a drawer in Narcissa's room. It is beautiful, adorned with Celtic knots and a stopper in the shape of a ring twined with delicate vine tendrils made of platinum. Through the tendrils, one can barely read the engraving: "Omnia tea mecum porto."

The thoughts swirling inside, then transparent, then shimmering in many colours, defile the fragile beauty of their receptacle. So much so that, come six o'clock, Draco doesn't even have a split second to admire that beauty as he grabs the thing and stuffs it into his coat pocket with averted eyes.

He is already halfway down the stairs when something occurs to him. He turns around, goes back to his room and opens his wardrobe. The coat he wore last Friday and Saturday hangs all the way to the right, freshly washed by Milly. He goes through the pockets, finds the ragged strip of cloth with the knot in the middle and stuffs it into the pocket that already holds the vial.

Ten minutes later, he reappears in a tiny, nondescript little village in Devon whose name reaches back through the past. Godric's Hollow is quiet except for a dog that barks irritably and the church bell that rings for half past six with a tinny little sound.

Potter's house is as ordinary and neat as the village it is part of. The lights are on inside.

Draco holds his breath as he presses the doorbell button. It has the shape of a golden snitch.

He is still holding the button down when Potter opens the door. For a moment, all his thoughts are confused and he wonders why he doesn't step outside to embrace him as a welcome, and why he says "Good evening" as if he were a stranger.

"Do you, uh." Potter looks past him as if looking around for nosey neighbours. "Do you want to come in?" It is not an invitation. Rather, it is a complicated question wrapped in a less complicated one.

"Do I want to come in?" Draco hears himself asking back in his head, voice fierce and snide. "Do I _want_ to come in and watch you drink down my most private, most shameful thoughts? Do I _want_ to come in and look you in the eye once it is done, and see you judging me?" He huffs, both in his imagination and in reality. "No. No, I don't. But I will have to anyway."

He doesn't even know exactly why. He just knows that he does. He needs to make sure-

"Yes," he eventually nods.

Potter hesitates, then nods in response and steps back to open the door wide enough for him come in.

The inside is as inconspicuous as the outside. Cosy without being cramped. The wardrobe is mostly populated with coats in children's size. Shoes are lined up almost neatly. A large oval mirror, put there to check oneself one last time before stepping outside, shows a thin blond guy with restless eyes. The shrill, piercing sound of a tea-kettle is in the air.

"I'm going to, uhm. Do the spell in the kitchen. It'll to take a bit of time to sink in and it's best done without any company so- are you sure you want to. Well. Wait?" He clenches a fist by his side. "You know you don't have to."

"I can wait in the sitting room," he says. He has slid his hand into his coat pocket. The vowing knot feels like a pebble between his fingers.

"Yes," Potter agrees and gestures vaguely in his direction. "It's just through that door."

The shrieking from the kettle stops abruptly. The very same moment Draco registers this, there is the sound of teacups ringing against one another.

Also, there is a coat on top of all the children's coats on the wardrobe. It clearly belongs to a woman. It has the Ministry emblem appliquéd to the lapel, half hidden because of the way the coat has been put on the hanger, but Draco has seen that emblem so many times already as it rummaged arrogantly through his shop that he recognizes it nevertheless.

"Malfoy. The sitting room's through there," Potter repeats insistently. His body is almost forming a wall between him and the kitchen from where more little sounds are emerging now that he is specifically listening for them.

"Who's in there?" he asks Potter, narrowing his eyes.

_You promised._

"No one – Look, if you _really_ have to stay, just wait in the sitting room, alright?" He looks like a shepherd trying to shoo a reluctant sheep into the pen.

"_Why_ is _she_ here?" he hisses through involuntarily bared teeth.

"Ugh. Calm down, Malfoy."

Granger steps around the corner, steaming cup of tea in hand. "I'm just here to stand by. Not everyhing is about _you_." She throws Potter a look. "Can we wrap this up? You know I want to pick Hugo up at quarter to."

With another short, cold glance at Draco, she vanishes back into the kitchen.

Draco bites his tongue until he can taste blood.

/

_You promised._

"Malfoy, please."

_You swore._

"No."

He reluctantly lets the vowing knot go and reaches out for the door handle.

In the split second between his grasping the handle and Potter's hand coming down to clutch his arm roughly, he realises his mistake. He realises he had conflated the person from his dreams and Harry Potter when really they just happen to look alike.

Reality is Potter harshly grabbing his elbow, uncaring about proximity and physical touch, imperiously demanding, "Get a hold of yourself."

"Let me go." He jerks his arm out of his grip.

"Think about your son," he says and Draco bares his teeth to hiss back, "Don't you _dare_."

When Draco breaks eye contact to make another move for the door, Potter reminds him, "We talked about this. It's too late to cry off now. You swore. Whatever it took."

He considers hitting him. In the face, with his fist. "No, _you_ swore. You swore you wouldn't make her privy-"

Potter rolls his eyes and grabs him again, so quickly and powerfully that he can't do anything against it. Off balance, he is dragged into the living room like a criminal would be dragged into a cell by an Auror.

"And I didn't. Listen to me," Potter orders and steps close so he doesn't have to talk loudly. The living room door magically slams shut behind him. "I told you the spell would be tricky. Of course it would be, otherwise we'd be using it all the time. It's too complicated to do it alone, it needs a stand by."

He lets him go, but he might as well have him pinned down. He doesn't move an inch. "The stand by," he says very slowly, "does not need to see the thoughts that will be implanted. They are just there to contain and guide the spell from the outside."

Draco feels how that green colour pours into him again, persuading and coaxing him into believing that this isn't just a big, convenient lie. His tongue is heavy when he objects, "_I_ could have done it, then."

"Pardon me, but we really don't have the time for you to learn it. Not to mention that you are compromised. I couldn't risk you botching this up because of your reluctance. A spell like this gone wrong is seriously bad. Long-term residency at fourth floor St Mungo's bad."

"Then any other colleague of yours-" he insists, but Potter cuts in with a low but stony voice.

"Yes, I guess I could have asked any other colleague of mine to stand by for me on this. Colleagues from Europe and Africa who have never seen your face, rarely even heard your name and wouldn't know who you are."

In order to quell any objection, he takes half a step closer again so they are almost chest to chest. Just like the doppelgänger from Draco's nightmares, Harry Potter knows how to affect him frighteningly well.

"Still, any random colleague would have wondered about me using this spell. It is outdated, obscure and just plain weird – I mean, which person would want other people's thoughts in their brain anyway? That random colleague would have told other random colleagues until every single Auror, secretary, clerk, official and caretaker in the Ministry would have heard about it through the grapevine."

Draco turns his face away and looks at a spot on the floor.

"I told you the judges I picked are prudish, but they are certainly not dumb. They would connect the dots and then they would disregard me for the interrogation because they would know I had rigged my own memory that way. Things would go out the window so quickly and thoroughly you'd jump right after them. And pull me along with you because, as you might have forgotten, we're tied together in this."

He bites his tongue again although it is still sore. The pain comes too late, however. He is already thinking about that other time when they were tied together. At the wrists.

"Hermione on the other hand won't say a word of this to anybody. I asked her to help with this even though I couldn't tell her what it was really about, and she _still _said yes. I specifically asked her not to view the material, and I know she will honour that request. She also knows the spell better than any random colleague. I trust her completely." He pauses for effect. "So how about you forget for a minute that you hate her guts and focus on the fact that she's helping you hold on to your son?"

As if on cue, the door opens. "Harry, I don't have forever. Hugo's waiting."

Draco can see his persona fall off of him. He has already taken two steps back to re-establish a polite distance. "Right," he says, turning to her, "I'll be right there," then turns back to look him in the eye expectantly.

When Draco doesn't move and doesn't say anything – because there is an angry clamouring in his head – Potter murmurs, "For your son, Malfoy."

"_The standby _doesn't need to_ see_", Potter had said. Not that she wouldn't. Not that she couldn't.

Long moments pass. The clamour crescendos sharply when he sees Granger rolling her eyes and crossing her arms in front of her chest, then ebbs away a little when looking at Potter's face, searching for and not finding indications of dishonesty in it. The words _absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence_ rise out of the noise. Suddenly he is afraid that his judgement is completely clouded when it comes to Potter, and that he had no way of telling whether he had been lying to him this entire time.

Despite all that, when Potter suddenly holds out his hand, he almost reaches out to take it, out of reflex. A split second later, he understands, and scolds himself for almost slipping up.

_For Scorpius._

He takes the vial out of his coat pocket and lays it into his open palm. Potter also doesn't appreciate the artistry and instead closes his fingers around it immediately.

"So. Why don't you take a seat over here?" Potter motions toward a very comfy-looking armchair quite close to the unlit fireplace. "Hermione, let's go to the kitchen."

And off they go. The door falls shut softly, shutting him both in and out. Draco suddenly feels like puking. He sits down in the armchair Potter pointed out and puts his head in his hands, all the while imagining that this is the part in which, after days of helplessly sliding around on the surface, he is finally pulled under by the avalanche so that it might grind him to dust.

He closes his eyes and imagines picking Scorpius up from the Hogwarts Express until his chest aches.

/ **TBC**

_Thank you for reading! _

_There'll be two chapters at once tomorrow. (Always depending on whether or not ff dot net plays along, of course. My window of opportunity will be woefully narrow, and if I get another "Error Type 1" I won't be able to wait until they fix it. Cross your fingers!)_


	20. Chapter 19

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Whoo-hoo, I had 50 visitors on my last chapter :) _

_Please enjoy!_

/

**-/Chapter 19/-**

/

"Everything is in order," Granger's voice rings out from the door. He tries and fails to not look like it made him jump. He hadn't heard the door opening. His head was pounding too loudly.

"Since I have no idea what exactly this is all about and how large that thought is that Harry is just implanting into his brain, I can't say how long he's going to take." He assumes that she is speaking that fast on purpose. "Basically, though, there's an average conversion of seventeen to one, so it'll take him one second to absorb seventeen seconds worth of thought."

Even though this information is actually helpful, Draco cannot help but be annoyed with her presence, her voice and how it all reminds him of Hogwarts – when she punched him in the face – and then of that warrant with her tidy signature on it – with which she also punched him in the face, figuratively.

"Thank you," he says, tight-lipped and without meaning it at all. He can't read her any more than he can read Potter, he discovers. She might have seen it. She might be in the know.

"If this is going to result in trouble for Harry, in any way at all, I'm going to make you pay," she replies lightly. Obviously satisfied with the absence of back talk from him, she leaves and gets her coat from the wardrobe.

"When he's done, tell him to do the finishing spell like I've shown him to fix it down properly," he hears her say through the half-open door.

He breathes a small sigh of relief when the door falls into the lock behind her and the house is Granger-free and quiet.

The relief follows her out after about twenty seconds. Waiting for Potter, alone, is hardly bearable. He gets up from the chair, then sits back down again, only to get back up instantly and walk around the room.

He goes to inspect the bookshelves – photos of the three Potter kids, of the Weasley kids, even a wedding photo of Granger and Weasley that makes him only a little sick.

No pictures of Ginny.

Two cacti, an ornamental glass sphere that glitters in the light like a teardrop, a paperweight made of amber in the shape of a scarab beetle. Quite a lot of books – some magical, some muggle. Five expensive editions of Quidditch Illustrated, huge tomes on Wizarding Law and Wizarding Justice and The Aurors Code as well as four different editions of Luna Lovegood's celebrated publication ('Me, Snorkack'), a large, unread-looking tome of Homer, soft-cover books of Follet, Mankell, an ancient, leather-clad Dante, Galbraith, Wilde, Hemingway, a complete Tolkien collection, Vonnegut, Larsson, King, Kafka, several Steinbecks, a full set of Shakespeare. In the lowest shelf, a half dozen photo albums, bound in thick leather. He touches the spines but doesn't pull any book from its place on the shelf.

There's a pencil drawing mounted on the wall showing a lion, a snake, a badger and a hawk, framed by a stylized "Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus". The signature in the corner is hard to read, but after a few moments he recognizes 'Dean Thomas'. The other picture another Thomas. He copied Hopper's Nighthawks. Draco never liked it, and especially dislikes it now. The estrangement and desolation in it is too palpable, too thick.

Then he goes to look out the window, but apart from a thin strip of front yard lawn, a hedge and the empty street, all dipped in dark blue and grey and black ink and robbed of their concrete outlines, there isn't much to see.

He resolutely keeps staring while his insides are churning with anxiety.

Hours seem to have passed when there is a small cough by the door.

His heart and stomach drop two inches, then clench, then turn.

Funny, suddenly he would give everything to go back to waiting. Forever. He cannot turn and face him, so he keeps looking straight ahead. At his own reflection staring back at him, eyes wide like a frightened child, face white as chalk.

"Well," Potter's voice rings out with an odd tremor. "That was different."

Draco sets his jaw and concentrates on breathing, and on not looking at Potter's faint reflection in the window pane.

Nobody says anything for long moments.

Draco suddenly remembers Granger's advice. "She told me," he starts, chokes on his own dry throat and begins again after some coughing. "She told me to remind you of the finishing spell to fix it down."

"Yeah, I already did that." Then, "They're not going anywhere."

He winces. "I told- I begged you-"

"Draco," Potter says loudly and strongly. Only that one word. It makes him turn around.

The first thing he realizes is that, for the first time since their meeting on 1st of September the year before, Potter pointedly doesn't look him in the eye. He is staring at an undefined spot on the floor between them.

He shrugs as he is standing there in the door frame, an almost helpless gesture. He looks flushed, as if he had racked himself with the spell.

"I just figured that it'd be inappropriate to keep calling you by your last name now."

"Potter." That is all he manages to say, and only barely.

"I'm flattered," Potter says vehemently, then repeats, more quietly, "I'm flattered. Really. You've... you made me younger, more attractive and more, uhm... more virile than I actually am."

"I-" _-did no such thing. He's not you_, he wants to explain, but doesn't know how, and also suddenly unsure whether any of it is entirely true now even though it had been so certain not even an hour ago. _I just made him up to hurt myself._ "I do not want to talk about this with you." He hardly dares to part his teeth. There is a sour taste in his mouth which is suddenly flooded with saliva. "This is-" Mortifying. Shameful. "Unbearable," he croaks through a tight throat so the word is hardly audible. "I have to go now."

_I shouldn't have stayed in the first place. What was I thinking?_

"Draco, I'm serious. It isn't half as bad-"

"Don't call me that!" he exhales on the verge of panic – he_ calls me that, you know only _he_ does_ - rushes past him and bolts out the door. As he disapparates, he can hear Potter call his name – his first name – after him.

Hours later, as he is lying awake in his bed, it occurs to him how cruelly ironic it is that these poisonous thoughts in his head had made him crave exactly _that_, that intimate and desperate call, but then ended up making him run from it.

The next morning, there is a small, skittish owl waiting for him on his kitchen table. Milly must have let it in. The note on its leg reads 'It'll have to be all of it, or it'll all have been useless' without a sender.

Draco takes only coffee for breakfast, convinced that his stomach couldn't handle anything else. In his mouth, the coffee is tasteless, with a hint of acid and desperation. Throughout the day, the sound of the two identical men saying his name haunts him until he can't tell them apart any more, until he beings to doubt that he ever could.

/

The box isn't heart-shaped, but it does come with a bow. A pink one. Draco rips it off and throws it into the fireplace, watches it blacken and wither.

The card Boothe has attached is spelled blank with a flick of the wand, the writing isn't spared so much as a glance. He scribbles 'I received a package' on the inside and 'Potter' on the outside and sends Milly to dispatch the note for him.

He tosses and turns for hours. The box and its contents – which he glanced at for a split second, long enough to see iridescent clouds swirling inside a plain glass container that looked like a preserving jar – and also Potter's response are like two sore teeth. He is not able to ignore them. With his eyes open, he lies there, but while his body might be in bed, his mind in his office with the two items, circling them, circling like vultures.

Tomorrow evening. Nine o'clock.

This time, he will only hand the material over at the threshold. He already tries to come up with excuses that allow him to make a speedy getaway, so Potter won't have a chance to talk. Draco knows that he would. He would repeat what it says in the note that is currently sitting on his office desk, and Draco couldn't bear hearing it. He hardly even read the letter, merely skimmed it for the date – '_tomorrow evening, nine sharp, Godric's Hollow, knock, don't ring the doorbell please, Lily will already be asleep (I hope)'_ – but the bits he picked up without wanting to have already eaten into him like worms regardless.

How it isn't all bad.

How he did the right thing.

How there is no reason to feel ashamed on his account.

How Potter feels sorry for him.

How Potter wishes he would trust him.

How he should remember the vow he made.

How everything would be all right.

How everything would be all right.

How everything-

He feels his way down the steep stairs of his parents' wine cellar, the cold creeping into his bones through the thin fabric of his pyjamas and the robe he threw on. It smells like dust and earth and wintriness, and then of cork and glass.

The bottle he empties first is labelled Blishen, 1902 in fat black Fraktur and carries a pickaxe-wiedling badger as a brand on its neck. The more he depletes the liquid, the funnier the badger becomes.

"Everything will be alright, you know?" he tells it, but the craftsanimal doesn't respond which he thinks is rather impolite.

Every time a thought of tomorrow, of Potter's face, of the insufferable letter comes to mind, it is promptly washed away in a flood of amber. If the mighty wind that is Wagner's music can't hold them down, at least a torrent of alcohol can.

The sun is coming up sluggishly when he weaves into his office. The idea he had – about confronting the offensive items, like a man would, like a _Malfoy_ would, with the wand drawn and a curse ready – had dissolved while he was making his way up the staircase.

"It's like I got myself a super-super fast new broom, right," he says very slowly, addressing the bottle in his hand – this new one doesn't have a brand at all, so he talks to it as a whole – as well as the box on the desk. "Like, it is mine. And then... I jus' give it away."

The bottle tings and gurgles back at him. It sounds almost annoyed, so Draco becomes annoyed with it.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'd ride that damn broom at least once, I would," he barks at the bottle and flings it at the unlit fireplace. Whiskey is sprinkled over the carpet and the dead coals. "I would!"

He fumbles the glass out of the box and opens it, straining and yelling and finally breaking a seal. The pensieve is back in its function as a drip mat right on the desk, so he disposes of the inkwell and upends the glass into the grey bowl.

"Everything will be-," he starts but cannot finish. The tip of his thumb touches the billowing white, and he is pulled in and under and along.

/

It turns out to be a sunny day. It's barely March, but it almost feels like spring. The muddy greys and browns lighten up as the moisture is sucked out of them, and the world seems washed out and bleached. Bleached, blinding, as if long needles of white light were poking into his brain.

His eyes are sore. His throat is sore. Every part of him, inside and out, feels sore.

The sample was quite unrepresentative. They had carefully sifted through four nights of dreaming and edited bits of it, cut them out and reassembled them so they would form something of a narrative. Actually, everything is much more of a maelstrom of pictures and sounds, illogical, jumbled.

It isn't just Potter. There are flashes of other faces as well, of places, scenes. Dumbledore and Voldemort are both in his dreams. His parents. Hogwarts. Scorpius. The Ministry atrium. Astoria. The Quidditch pitch. He dreams of flying, of making potions, and of drowning, and of making a casserole, and of killing people.

Oddly, next to that chaos, the thoughts of him and Potter together almost felt reassuring, like respite, no matter how obscene.

_Damn_, he thinks and swallows the hangover potion with a grimace. _I should go see a therapist about that._

Magnus takes one look at him and assures him that he can handle the shop by himself. Draco puts up some token resistance and eventually lets himself be sent home.

He writes a letter to Scorpius. It is ridiculously hard not to give his new knowledge away, even though all his questions are innocently trivial, and all he writes about his own life deals with his plans for the tree house at the far side of the Malfoy property, by the side of the rivulet where they had caught faereflies last year, and the fact that Eustace Shrewsbury hasn't responded to his inquiry about New York yet.

In the evening, he apparates to Godric's Hollow.

He doesn't even have to knock. Potter is already standing there, leaning in the door frame with his hands jammed into his armpits against the cold. His face is red. He takes the little jar from him.

"Wait," he calls out just as Draco is about to apparate home again. It is the first word spoken this evening.

Draco turns around and waits. Potter has vanished into the house and reappears some seconds later.

"I wanted to give that back," he says and holds out Narcissa's vial. For a moment, Draco thinks about telling him to keep it, but then changes his mind.

"Dra- Malfoy," he says when Draco slips the vial into his coat pocket.

"Remember the plan," Draco replies and disapparates.

Four days later, a large, officious-looking eagle owl brings him a copy of an approved petition – Harold James Potter v Ransom Plutus Boothe, the claimant accusing the defendant of trover and first degree privacy violation - and a subpoena – Ransom Plutus Boothe v Harold James Potter, the claimant accusing the defendant of slander and malicious persecution. On the latter, the court date reads 17th of March. Scribbled into the corner with a ball pen, it says '_It's expedited procedure. Higgs is the judge. Preliminary hearing is tomorrow. They'll probably summon you soon after that if I can't avoid it. See you in court. Remember the plan._'

At first, he is taken aback because the date seems frighteningly close, but then Potter's little note reminds of the fact that he would not see him again until then. Suddenly, it will be almost too long until the 17th.

He calls Milly to instruct her in dismantling the howlers he is sure will come soon enough. The time to put up with them is over.

/ **TBC**

_Yep, I filched that line from a Nine Inch Nails song._

_Next chapter is right up._


	21. Chapter 20

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Did you read chapter 19 already? I also uploaded it today._

_Another short one, but I couldn't deny myself that cliffhanger. Sorry, guys! Please enjoy :)_

/

**-/Chapter 20/-**

/

He does his best to ignore the looks Boothe and his lawyer, a dourly-looking brunette who introduced herself as Agnes Kennedy with a bone-crushing, ice cold handshake, are giving him as well as their hissed conversation. They are currently the only three people waiting for the doors of courtroom 14b to open. The blackboard hanging below the brass '14b'-sign reads 'Potter v Boothe, pres, HH Gardenia Mafalda Higgs, 3:40pm'.

It is 3:38pm, and Potter isn't there.

Draco's stomach is in knots.

All or nothing. A life with or without his son. Victory or shame.

"Miss Na'amah and your dear wife Astoria send their warmest regards, Mr Malfoy," Boothe jolts him out of his thoughts, and before Draco can come up with an answer, someone says, "How lovely of them. Send our regards in return, will you, Plutus?"

Potter walks down the stairs at an almost leisurely pace. His movements and the Auror's uniform he is wearing under a normal cloak speak of dominance and a self-confidence that make it very hard indeed to take one's eyes off him.

"Potter." Kennedy is the first to break from the trance. "I hear you still didn't find yourself a lawyer. I thought we talked about this after the prelim."

"Lawyer, Schmawyer, Agnes," he drawls back with a dismissive hand gesture. "Who needs a lawyer when he's got truth on his side, anyway? Now if you'll excuse me."

Without giving her another second, he walks over to Draco and pulls him along by the shoulder, away from the other two.

"You're late," is the first thing that comes to Draco's mind that is actually safe to say. _I'm so glad to see you_ is swallowed back down right along with _Please don't touch me_ and appreciative comments about his attire.

"I know," Potter concedes hastily with a low voice, all his swagger gone. "Sorry 'bout that. Listen, the tests runs with the veritaserum went well, so things are looking good. I hinted at the nature of the material in the prelim and Higgs went all pale, so there's a chance it'll never come up at all. The only thing we'll absolutely have to avoid, anyway, is _you_ having to testify under serum. I honestly tried to persuade Higgs to leave you out of this entirely, but Kennedy talked her into it, so now we'll have to deal with it. At least you're only a visitor for now."

"I suppose you have a plan?" Draco had been supposing that from the day he got the summons, just as Potter had prophesied he would, but he hadn't had the nerve to send an owl to Potter to ask him about it. The _See you at court_ had been so definite.

"Four, actually, depending on the situation, and a contingency plan." He clears his throat. "Let's just hope she'll question me first to make it quick."

"What does that contingency plan consist of?" Draco is just asking as the doors open from the inside with a rumble and a squeal. An announcer steps outside with a scroll in hand and reads the names of all four persons within earshot. "This hearing is closed to the public," he informs the thin air when they have already stepped inside, "as per Wizarding Court Law of 1284, paragraph seven, sub-paragraphs seven A to D-"

The courtroom is large, cold and empty but for a court recorder sitting as if in a pulpit to the side. He is busy sharpening his quills and doesn't even glance at them.

Kennedy and Boothe walk through the gate in the low balustrade that separates the gallery from the well and take their seats at the left hand table, so Potter takes the one to the right. Both tables are at an angle, arranged to face the judge's seat on the podium.

Draco chooses a seat to the left of the aisle, so he can see most of Potter's profile while the other two would have to turn around to look directly at him.

A young woman in a midnight blue robe who turns out to be the courtroom deputy comes into the room from the head side and steps onto the podium. "All rise for the judge."

The procedure gets under way. Attendance registers are checked, the context is expounded, charges are read, laws are specified.

Draco studies Potter's profile and posture.

Things start out well enough.

/

"Your Honour, I call Mr Draco Lucius Malfoy to the witness box."

Draco freezes, then braces himself to rise. His heart is pounding. _One question. One question and everything will fall apart. _

Boothe's testimony, not under veritaserum, because his lawyer had deemed it unnecessary and Potter hadn't objected, had been the censored version of what had really happened. All the things, from the moment Daphne had talked him into considering calling on his service, to the making of the contract that has been presented in detail – always withholding the functions of the paragraphs seventeen and twenty-one – and the usage of the morpheuspheres, and finally to the dissolving of the contract and Potter staking out a "baseless claim".

During his talk, Draco had tried to make eye contact with Potter several times, tried to signal him that he should cross-examine him – a pointed question or two would have been sufficient to expose Boothe's vile scheme.

But Potter had remained silent, and he even declined to interrogate Boothe at all when given the opportunity. He generally hadn't said anything much, and Agnes Kennedy had got into her sensibly-heeled stride without so much as an interruption.

Draco glances at the glittering little flask of veritaserum on the judge's desk, then at Potter in his bench and pushes a thought at him._ You said everything would be-_

Before he can get all the way to his feet, Potter shoots up from his seat. "And I object," he calls with what Draco recognizes as his Auror voice, then clears his throat and adds, "Your Honour."

"And why would that be, Auror Potter?" Judge Higgs asks with a somewhat bored tone that veils the annoyance beneath. Draco wonders if Potter can hear it, too.

"Because Mr Malfoy is personally involved with the claimant. With me. And therefore exempt from examination."

"Mr Potter, with all due respect," Kennedy pipes up from her seat and gestures toward him, then turns to Judge Higgs, "Not calling Mr Malfoy to testify would be ridiculous. He made the contract with my principal, and the object of this entire case pertains to him."

"Allegedly," Potter interjects and throws Kennedy a poisonous glance which she pointedly ignores.

"I believe, Your Honour, it would be wise to include Mr Malfoy here."

"Wise, maybe," Potter nods and raises his voice, "but also unlawful."

"Auror Potter, do not presume me to be ignorant of the rules of my own courtroom." Higgs gives him a look that reminds Draco of a displeased magpie.

"I wouldn't dare, Your Honour. However, I'm not so sure when it comes to Mrs Kennedy," he says and Mrs Kennedy promptly rises with an indignant 'Mr Potter!'

Potter doesn't allow her interruption and raises his voice again. "Mrs Kennedy seems to have forgotten that witnesses can refuse to testify in the case of personal involvement. This is the case with Mr Malfoy, since he is indubitably personally involved with me. Thus he would be a biased witness anyway, and he is furthermore entitled to protection from questioning."

"Judge Higgs," Kennedy scoffs and Draco can hear the eye rolling even though he can't see it, "what Mr Potter is trying to say is that every single person he attended Hogwarts with is automatically unsuited for the witness box in any case involving himself." She throws Potter a steely glance. "This behaviour is alarming especially if we take into account the possibility that some sort of collusion between Mr Potter and Mr Malfoy has taken place to obscure the situation to the detriment of my client."

"Allegedly. Again," Potter responds acidly with a steely glance of his own. "Also, I'd appreciate if you could desist from calumny, Mrs Kennedy."

"Mrs Kennedy, some discipline, please," Judge Higgs stares at the lawyer over the rim of her glasses, then turns toward Potter. "Then again, Auror Potter, Mrs Kennedy does indeed have a point. We all know that Mr Malfoy and you have a past, this sort of personal involvement is not a sufficient reason for an objection of this kind, as I'm sure you know."

Draco breathes and straightens to get up, but freezes when he becomes aware of Potter's eyes on him. There is an unspoken word that hangs between them, before Potter breaks the connection by turning his head toward the judge to say, "Actually, Your Honour, the relationship between Mr Malfoy and me has changed considerably since the Hogwarts days, which is why I object to him being called to testify."

"Mr Potter, unless you are trying to tell us that Mr Malfoy and you are-"

"That is _exactly_ what I am telling you, Mrs Kennedy. Your Honour. Mr Boothe."

There is a short, stunned silence that is only interrupted by Draco's breath catching in his throat. He clenches his teeth and wishes Potter would stop talking which, of course, he does not.

"The object of this court case – the concrete object - encased in the core of the two morpheuspheres, are thoughts – fantasies, if you will, but most of them consist of actual memories. My own memories of sexual encounters between me and my partner. Mr Malfoy and I have an intimate relationship." He pauses for a heartbeat, as if for effect. "He is my lover."

/ **TBC  
**

_Have a good weekend, everyone! See you on Sunday, that'd be awesome._


	22. Chapter 21

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Hey everyone, I'm back from an exhausting (but fun) weekend trip to No-Wireless-Ville where I stayed at the No-Internet-Inn. _

_Thanks to AddiTood57 for following, and to La Argentina for a whole bunch of reviews for all of my stories (even on "Doors" - it takes a special kind of patience to get through that. I promise I'll revise that someday, if only to get rid of all the typos, mistakes, disastrous punctuation and the bad formatting)._

_And thanks to Slylove for another review! I'm glad you also liked that cliffhanger ^_^ You wanted an update ... well, here you are._

_Please enjoy!_

/

**-/Chapter 21/-**

/

Draco can hardly hear the addition 'and therefore he must lawfully be excluded from being called into the box' over the sound of his heart hammering in his chest. He pinches the pad of his thumb with his fingernails, to fight pain with pain.

_He is my lover._

It sounded so honest it hurts.

Potter, Kennedy and Judge Higgs dispute for several minutes, but their words are a dull droning in his head. He looks around the courtroom out of the corners of his eyes, at the two people next to the judge, the deputy and the court reporter at the far side who is studiously observing the recording quill as it flits across the parchment.

Draco suddenly itches with the urge to get up and snatch that quill and break it, to wipe the still wet ink away, maybe stand on the poor guy's table and announce that it was all just make-believe, a big theatre production staged only for himself, so Potter might stop lying for him and about him.

_My lover. _He says it with such fervour.

A flutter in his lap disrupts his thoughts, and he looks down to find a Ministry memo trying to not fall through the gap between his thighs. He reflexively grasps it and the paper bird becomes still in his fingers and unfolds. A short glance and a green-eyed look tells him the sender – Potter is back at his desk while Kennedy is still at the judge's table, engaged in heated discussion – but the handwriting alone would've been enough, even though it was clearly written in a hurry.

_sorry_, it reads, and in the next line, _relax_.

Draco presses his lips together, lowers his head and, for once, breathes in deeply to try and take the advice. Even though he knows that this is nothing but Potter's vested interest in him not making a scene and blowing his cover, it feels a little like the firm kindness he remembers receiving from the man in his dreams.

Right now, he feels like he needs someone to tell him what is best for him. To tell him what to do.

Finally, the third and last line on the slip of paper reads_ come up to my bench during recess_.

Before he can really think about this, Judge Higgs calls him out of his thoughts. "Gentlemen, ladies, I need a minute," she announces and pulls her glasses off her nose, folds and places them next to her gavel. "Ten minutes recess. Don't leave the hall, please."

She gets up and gathers her gown around her to step down from her dais. Instead of immediately retreating to the back room, she walks to the court recorder and bows down to ask him something. They converse over the quill still moving. Kennedy beckons Boothe over and they stick their heads together.

When Draco sees Boothe measuring him sideways with his cold eyes, the old mask falls into place effortlessly. With his gaze firmly and solely on Potter and his head high, he finally gets up from his seat, slides the folded note into his pocket, straightens his suit and tie and goes to him like he was bidden.

Potter looks up and smiles as he sees him coming, and that smile seems to hollow out his stomach.

"Thanks," Potter says quietly when he is in hearing distance, and then, even more quietly, "and sorry for this, too."

"For-?" he begins but falls silent when Potter steps so close to him that their chests almost touch. Normally, he would have staggered backwards to keep his personal space intact, but it's Potter, so his whole body just freezes up. It starts tingling from head to toe with the unfulfilled promise of a touch that he remembers clearly and vividly even though it has never taken place.

"Calling his bluff would have exposed me and my deceit as well," Potter whispers urgently, half over his shoulder, half into his ear. Draco can feel his warm breath tickling his earlobe and the side of his neck. "Also, I couldn't imagine that you would want Astoria in court. What would Scorpius think."

His mouth clicks shut. Boothe's fragmentary account had him so riled up that he had lost sight of it for a moment.

"So we're on the contingency plan now," Potter continues. "Is the magpie watching us?"

Immediately he is aware of his body heat.

"I mean Higgs. She just sort of reminds me of a magpie. Do you see her?"

"Uhm," he manages, and Potter presses again, "Is Higgs watching us?"

"Yes," he croaks, swallows and repeats, "Yes, she is."

"Don't look at her too long. Does she seem worried?"

"Uh, yes. She's frowning and seems generally displeased." He turns his face to the side to not look at Higgs, and to appreciate Potter's profile from up close. He's still smiling, but at close quarters it doesn't look so effortless any more. "Then again, it might just be her normal facial expression." There's a gleaming sheen of sweat in his hairline and a vein pulsating visibly in his temple, and Draco wonders if they are sharing the same headache right now.

"Okay," Potter says and shrugs. "The important thing is that she's seeing this. I want to get her a bit testy with me before my testimony." He tilts his head toward him and lowers his voice even further. Draco imagines that they look very conspiratorial to the spectators. Or maybe like- like lovers necking.

"She's not one for expressions of private life in her precious courtroom. Especially if they don't align with her hetereonormative world view. Something about people having sex seems to frighten the woman to death."

"Is that wise, to rile up the judge against you?" Draco asks, idiotically bothered by the mention of the word 'sex', and by hearing him say it. He suddenly realizes how Potter's body shields him from Boothe and Kennedy.

"I hope so," Potter answers lightly. "I want her to want us out of her hall as quickly as possible. The shorter my questioning, the better for us. Chances are that she'll even admit my claim to make this case a tacendum." The smirk Draco can see from the side suddenly gets a bit more honest. "I doubt she'd want any mention of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy fucking in her court record. The bloodhounds of the press would smell it two clicks against the wind, and she'd not have another quiet minute trying to keep it hush-hush. Her personal nightmare, I assume."

'Fucking' is even worse than 'sex', especially when it's about Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. Draco licks his lips before talking again.

"Potter, if this doesn't go the way you think..." He doesn't finish, unsure what to say exactly. This is all like a big game of chess, and now that the game is under way, Draco realizes that he is nothing but a helpless spectator. A spectator who doesn't fully understand the rules and is unable to think ahead – and thus condemned to dread every single move. Meanwhile, the actual player has taken it on himself to stake his own life and reputation along with his.

In theory, he already knew this would happen before the game started, but it is different now. It is different to experience it. It makes him horribly scared of losing. For Potter's sake as well as his own.

In response, Potter's fingers graze his wrist. The contact is so fleeting that he doesn't even have the time to flinch back. "Save it," he murmurs and steps back, wordlessly dismissing and sending him back to his seat. "Just keep making doe-eyes at me and we'll be fine." Then he actually winks at him and Draco feels his body go hot all over.

Boothe and his lawyer, visible again, turn their faces away emphatically. Judge Higgs finally exits the room for the recess. The minute taker at his lone desk glances at him as his hands roll up the recording parchment mechanically, then looks back down at his work without any discernible reaction. It's like a curtain has been drawn on him. Draco exits the stage and sits by himself, in the audience of the Harry Potter Show. Rapt with reluctant admiration for the lead actor, even though it hurts. Even though, after the last curtain call, Draco knows all his masks will fall again and his winks and touches will only have been part of the act.

/

"For the record, are you Harold James Potter, are you a certified Auror of the Ministry of Magic? And please state your date of birth and address."

Potter answers two affirmatives and gives the information Judge Higgs demanded. Draco presses his sweaty palms together between his knees. _She does seem irritated. Is it according to protocol to ask four questions in one?_

Back when he was interrogated at his parents' and his own hearings, they only ever asked one question at a time, and posed the question painstakingly slowly and accurately, so that there could be no misunderstanding, and no way for him to wriggle out of the answer.

_Then again, I was a Death Eater, and so was my father. Our hearings were only perfunctory. Everything was different back then. _

_And this... this is Harry Potter._

He asks himself if they had changed the dosage or the composition of the serum as well. He distinctly remembers feeling utterly ill and miserable under the influence of the drug, puking out the answers like living things that crawled up his oesophagus no matter how much he struggled, and he remembers most starkly his mother on the stand, dosed with veritaserum, how pale and sick she looked, with her hands clenched around a stained handkerchief.

Sitting in the witness box, Potter looks positively comfortable. He exudes health, strength, along with a sincerity that would have won over a jury immediately, if there were one.

Draco keeps his palms pressed together firmly and hopes that his manner is enough to win over a vexed magpie as well.

"Can you specify, for the record, in appropriately vague terms, the content of the objects of this case?"

"Yes, I can," Potter answers, and follows up without further prompt. "The objects of this case are two identical devices by the name of 'morpheusphere', which are designed to capture a sleeping person's thoughts, dreams, during the night, for the purpose of psychological therapeutic analysis after the fashion of an automaton pensieve. Both morpheuspheres in question here specifically contain thoughts of a private and intimate, explicitly erotic nature. Mr Ransom Plutus Boothe, the prosecutor, despite his allegations to the contrary, has neither legal, nor contractual, and certainly no natural claim on these thoughts, since they are mine and not my partner's, and it goes without saying that it is sensitive material which my partner and I wish to keep absolutely private."

_My partner and I. My partner and I._ Draco shakes his head to try and keep himself from latching on to that. In the absence of a name, it's easy for him to convince himself that he's talking about someone entirely else.

But then he looks up to find Potter's eyes meeting his for the fraction of a second and all the effort is undone.

"Can you explain, for the record again, how the devices, the morpheuspheres, ended up in Mr Malfoy's possession?"

"Yes, I can," Potter answers again, and tells the judge what he learned from Draco three weeks ago in a lousy little café in Muggle London. The whole, long story, in small steps, but twisting the narration to dovetail the fabricated bottom line. In the end he manages to talk for more than five minutes straight somehow, and Draco can see Judge Higgs chewing on the inside of her own cheek and rolling the quill in her fingers. Impatience.

"Since it is always said that everyone does necessarily dream, we have assumed that Draco simply has no recollection of his own dreams, due to an otherwise harmless medical, neurological condition of some sort. However, it might also be that he is the exception to the rule and really does not dream, while I surely do, and did. This, we believe, is how my dreams were caught in the morpheuspheres, despite my sleeping on the further side of the bed."

"Thank you, Auror Potter. That was indeed very step-by-step," Judge Higgs acknowledges the end of his sermon with a grimace and a sigh. Then, she straightens up in her chair, looks at the questionee over the rim of her glasses and asks, "So, from your elaboration we can deduce that the thoughts contained in both morpheuspheres in question are, in fact, yours, is that correct?"

"Yes, that is correct," Potter nods. He sits a little straighter than before. "The thoughts contained within the spheres are mine and not Mr Malfoy's. As I have already particularised, this was not intended, but it is how it is."

"You have seen the full content to discern this?"

"Yes, I have," he nods again, his voice loud and steady. "There is no doubt that the materials recorded within are mine."

_Turns out you were right_, he thinks, imagining himself in a conversation with Potter, and touches the tip of his right middle finger to the centre of his right palm. Just where the coin had been.

There is a pause, then a quick scratch of the feather, and finally Judge Higgs turns to the minute taker to her right. "I believe no further questions to be relevant or necessary to this case." And then, sharply and without missing a beat, "Would you please sit down, Mr Boothe. And you too, Mrs Kennedy."

"Your Honour, my client has several questions, and, frankly, so do I."

"Mrs Kennedy, frankly, I don't care," Higgs shoots back. "You were present, at least bodily, these last two minutes, you have heard the Auror's testimony. Everything that is relevant to clear up the property situation here has been stated by Mr Potter under the influence of certified veritaserum. There can therefore be no doubt that your client was wrong to claim the objects and the material inside as his own. Any other question that you might inflict upon the witness here will only serve a vulgar urge of sensationalism and voyeurism the kind of which I do not condone in my courtroom."

The silence that falls like lead after she has finished seems to push Kennedy and Boothe back down onto their seats.

"Am I dismissed as a witness, Your Honour?" Potter asks, apparently utterly unaffected by the frosty atmosphere.

"Yes, Auror Potter, you can go." Judge Higgs waves her fingers dismissively.

As he gets up and rebuttons his suit, Potter gazes down on his opposition and clears his throat. "If so, then in my capacity as a lawyer representing myself, I would like to make several claims and also propose a deal to the accused and to the court. To wrap this case up."

Higgs looks like she means to say something but then motions for him to go on and scribbles on the paper in front of her instead of watching him stepping down from the witness box dais with some measure of theatricality.

"Mr Boothe and I have a common interest, which coincides, I believe, with the honourable judge's wishes. We'd all like to simply forget all of this. We'd prefer this case to be buried, literally. I therefore propose a Pompeiian, and invoke a tacendum to boot, to save everyone the paperwork, protect me and my partner's private sphere, and keep his and my relationship a secret."

"Mr Potter, we don't go Pompeiian unless the case is a matter of wizarding world security. Don't get pompous now," Higgs grumbles and frowns at him. "I'll grant the tacendum, but a normal confidentiality agreement between the plaintiffs will be quite adequate."

"I am well aware of that, but I do believe that we have precedents for Pompeiian measures in personal cases. Delicate cases, like this one."

Higgs frowns at him wordlessly, with the corners of her mouth pointing downwards in something that had to be distaste.

"What's more, in this case, both parties would demand this measure unequivocally." He turns toward Boothe. "Don't we, Mr Boothe?"

Boothe grinds his teeth for a few seconds, then leans forward to discuss with Kennedy. Probably about what exactly a Pompeiian actually is. Draco has never heard of it, but given that the city of Pompeii was buried under and preserved by volcanic ash and pumice, and then sank into oblivion for almost two millenia, he can imagine what it entails.

Eventually, the lawyer gets up and nods. "This is indeed my client's interest, Your Honour." Her voice sounds deflated, almost demure.

"Good," Potter says with a shark smile into Kennedy and Boothe's direction, and continues, "Furthermore, I demand an enforced obliviation of my recollections from the memories of all of Mr Boothe's associates who were in contact with the material."

"Mr Potter, this is not-" Kennedy starts, but Potter ignores her and just keeps on talking to make her shut up.

"I feel that this is the recompense Mr Boothe and his workforce owe me for the embarrassment and dismay they have caused both me and Mr Malfoy."

With his eyes fixed on Judge Higgs, he continues, "Please consider here my and Mr Malfoy's social standing as well as the nature of the material we are talking about. I believe I have legitimate reason to worry about the harm it would do in the wrong hands – or, rather, heads. And I also believe we can all agree that no one would want erotic pictures of themselves in someone else's possession."

For that last sentence, he had turned around to briefly look at Draco. His Auror mask lifts, but his expression shutters again so fast that Draco cannot read it properly.

That short flash almost looked like... anger?

"There is no need to clarify this, since we are all familiar with this case," Higgs says with a strain in her voice.

"If this is done to my satisfaction," Potter continues, voice booming through the courtroom, and turns toward the counterclaimant's desk, "I will desist from suing you and your entire enterprise for unprofessional and highly indecent, if not criminal behaviour, Mr Boothe, which would doubtlessly cause great public outrage." The _I will see to that_ is insinuated.

"Auror Potter, please abstain from threats in my courtroom," Judge Higgs warns.

Potter turns back toward her with a mild smile. "And finally," he disregards her interjection, "I hereby would like to claim the morpheuspheres and their content as my own and undisputed property, in contradiction to Mr Boothe's own ratified certificates. Of course I would pay for them if Mr Boothe so wished. I'd also like them to be handed over to me soon-ish. If you could set the paperwork into motion for me, Your Honour? Thank you. That is all."

He unbuttons his jacket again, sits down at his table and leans back. Then he looks around and his eyes meet Draco's.

Draco allows himself to hold his gaze for a few seconds, and to let out the breath he didn't realize he had been holding. As it leaves his body he has the wry notion that it was old, stagnant air that had been inside of him for ages, making him feel tired and grey. Weak. And now it is gone.

The rest of the hearing follows a protocol, with laws being read out and signatures – real ones and magical ones – given and oaths that contain words like yclept, usufructuary, dejerate and videlicet said in bored voices. Memos are sent to set into motion the necessary measures for the procedures demanded by Potter.

And undefined amount of time later, Draco finds himself outside the door of courtroom 14b with only a hazy recollection of what transpired the last – he checks his watch – four and a half hours.

He doesn't have the time to feel particularly upset or unsure about it, though, because next to him, there is Potter sitting on two identical morpheuspheres stacked upon each other as if they were a couple of upturned buckets and not several hundred galleons worth of sensitive therapeutic equipment. He is just loosening his tie and stretching his legs.

"Well," he goes with a long sigh, "that seems to have worked out in our favour. I think I need a drink. Don't you?"

/ **TBC  
**

_All legal jargon you might come across was inspired by three seasons of Suits and liberal amounts of Law & Order, The Closer and (of course) Criminal Intent._ _Also, I have NO idea about proper court procedure. Law students, please don't hate me. _


	23. Chapter 22

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Sorry I'm late! Busy day, busy busy busy. Between work and uni and Sherlock, I almost forgot. Sorry!_

_Okay, everyone! We're coming down the stretch now. And a change is a-coming. Actually, it's been happening for the last few chapters. I'd hope you already noticed. Anyway, enjoy!_

/

**-/Chapter 22/-**

/

The Leaky Cauldron is fairly empty at this time of day. Draco realizes he hasn't been there for ages – last time had been with Pansy, Gregory and Blaise, more than a decade ago – when the person behind the bar isn't Tom any more. The stout woman in his place looks vaguely familiar although the name – Potter calls her Hannah – does not ring a bell, either.

"Hannah? Hannah Abbot? She was in Hufflepuff, same year as us?" Potter offers when they slide onto the stool on a tall table near the back window. "You probably never exchanged a word in seven years."

"Oh, yeah," he mumbles at the first part, and goes, "No, I don't think," at the second. Potter tells him she married Neville Longbottom some months ago even though they had been together for ages, even have a daughter, Mary-Anne, and everything – outside the window, people start walking faster as the drizzle becomes rain.

He has the urge to slip his hand in his pocket to feel the two morpheuspheres there, not bigger or heavier than a pair of dice. Just to make sure they are still there, even though he just heard them clicking together when he was sitting down.

"Draco," Potter hauls his attention back and immediately apologises, "Uh, sorry, I know I shouldn't call you that."

"It's fine," he mumbles and half means it.

"You're awfully glum for a guy whose mess was just cleaned up," Potter observes after another spell of silence in which Draco's eyes are drawn to the rain outside the window again as if by magic.

"No, it's... It just doesn't feel real yet. I might be- dreaming." For once, a completely different kind of dream.

He presses his lips together.

_Also, it's not all over yet._

_There's still Astoria and the divorce._

He is planning to send her the papers tonight, as soon as he gets back to the manor.

_There's still telling Scorpius. _

What did normalcy even feel like?

_It's never really going to be over, is it?_

He can see Potter's face reflected in the window pane.

_And... there is still you._

In his pocket, the dice are right next to a strip of cloth with a knot in the middle.

_Not for much longer, though._

Something almost like regret stirs inside him.

Potter opens and then shuts his mouth twice and sips his drink with a dark look without saying anything. At his third attempt, Draco has mercy on him.

"How did you do it?" he asks and clarifies, "The questioning. I still have a faint recollection of it – guess it's going to fade quickly – and I know that..." He frowns. It's fading even more rapidly now that he's thinking of it. Even talking about it is hard, as if his tongue were going numb.

And things are starting to get confused in his head, because for a split second he remembered Potter calling him _lover_.

"Something was wrong with it. I – Did you manage to lie under veritaserum somehow?"

"I don't think that's possible." Potter lifts his eyebrows and tilts his head this way and that. "However, one can learn to... make some leeway. Even when under veritaserum."

"What, another nifty, obscure spell they taught you at Auror training?"

"Oh, it's not a spell. Just basic interrogation training we mostly cribbed from Muggle detectives."

_So they _do_ watch Criminal Intent._ Draco presses his lips together to keep from laughing due to the absurdity of it all.

Potter inhales deeply and sits up straight. "Proper interrogation with veritaserum is all about two things: The explicit question and the implicit question." Draco surmises that he's quoting the person who taught him, or maybe the Auror's Concise Handbook of Nifty Interrogation Techniques that surely exists somewhere. "Good interrogators know how to properly frame their exclusively explicit questions. They aim for informative or diagnostic yes-or-no answers. Bad interrogators insinuate their question, while their actually stated questions are very vague, with lots of room for interpretation, handing the power over the resulting answer mostly to the interviewee."

"Someone should tell the Ministry that Judge Higgs is a lousy interrogator, then." Draco sips his own beer. It tastes rich and bitter in his mouth, just like beer should. "How many cases did she cock up, do you think?" He looks down at the glass in his hand and wonders if its content is making him talk in such a manner, even though he only had half of it yet. _Not how a Malfoy should talk._

"Oh, very few, I imagine. Maybe this was a first. Depends on how many cases she had in which she personally interrogated a trained Auror, really." Potter paints a lopsided smiley face into the condensation on his glass with the tip of his index finger.

"I have learnt to ignore the implied question and only let the drug urge me toward the explicit question. So when the interrogator poses a question that starts with an auxiliary verb, such as 'Can you tell me...', I hear the explicit question and answer it – _Yes, I can_, or _No, I cannot_. Either answer satisfies the drug sufficiently, if you know how to focus hard enough. Everything after that is voluntarily given information which does not necessarily have to be bound to the truth." He smirks, and Draco assumes that he remembers some moment from the trial. "Other people couldn't help but respond to the implied question immediately – that which the bad interrogator _actually_ means: 'Tell me how, tell me what, tell me when...' - , thereby putting themselves into the position of having to answer it completely and accurately."

Draco contemplates for some seconds. "So you knew Higgs was a bad interrogator?"

"Yes," he says, then, "in a way," and drinks.

"In a way?" he echoes.

"In a way," Potter confirms with a wide nod and finally relents. "I – She's just a regular interrogator. She never went through any sort of formal training since she's a Wizengamot member, not an Auror. Everyone who never had formal training is inefficient at interrogating at best. And let's just say that I know how to push her buttons, and what the results of the buttonpushing were likely to be." He sighs and gives the smiley-face on his glass a pair of angry eyebrows.

Draco frowns along with the smiley on the glass. "What you're trying to say is, you had a vague inclination of how the whole thing would go down?"

His opposite shrugs. "You have to admit that it was a bit more than just _vague_."

He waits for Potter to defend himself more fiercely than that, but he doesn't.

"You just risked my life and... and your own life on a hunch."

"Draco, calm down."

Funny how hearing him say his first name makes it nigh on impossible for him to do the latter.

"Things went well. It's done."

"You could have-" He lowers his voice even though no one is around. "You could have lost your job. You could have gone to prison for perjury or fraud and attempting to deceive the Ministerial High Court. You..." Draco swallows and lets up under that even gaze.

"It's new to you, isn't it?" Potter says after five full seconds of measuring him. "Someone risking something for you. For someone to go out on a limb to save your arse." It doesn't even sound like a question in the end, more of an assessment, and an amusing one to boot, which only serves to irritate him.

"Actually," Draco contradicts heatedly, "it happened before. Some years ago. Back then, some complete idiot leapt onto a piece of kindling to pull me out of a bloody inferno."

He'd rather almost die in a fire again than almost lose his son a second time.

_And all I _did_ lose is my dignity._

_Fair trade._

Potter has the audacity to laugh loudly at his response. "Oh, yeah. Those were the days," he murmurs, clearly amused.

Silence falls. Draco looks into his beer glass and asks himself if Potter ever feels nostalgic about those days. He himself rarely does. Especially not now. He realizes that his knee his very close to Potter's under the table.

"I guess that's the Malfoy way of saying 'thank you', then," Potter suddenly says.

"I-" Draco starts but swallows his words. All at once he is embarrassed and uncomfortable, and saying two pathetic words would make it that much worse.

"Forget it," Potter hastily says, and Draco looks up at him with a raised eyebrow when he mumbles into his glass, "That was a stupid thing to say. Sorry."

"No, I _am_ grateful," Draco quickly insists, "I really, really am. It's just that I don't think that words- mean much."

"Well," Potter starts and bites his lip, apparently indecisive, before he continues hesitatingly. "In that case, there is an action which I would, uhm, accept as an expression of gratitude. In place of words."

And then he pointedly refuses to meet his eyes.

All at once, Draco is anxious.

"What... action- would that be?"

_Why does everything always sound ambiguous and __laced with innuendo__ in situations like this?_

He is aware of the proximity of their knees. Very aware indeed.

Potter gives a small, nervous laugh and wipes the beer glass with his thumb.

"It, uh," he says and clears his throat, and still doesn't look him in the eyes, "It's actually more of... the suspension of an action. It goes against- an agreement we came to some weeks ago."

Draco thinks back. There had been several agreements between them, most of them confounding, surprising and even frightening in their selflessness. Most of them were irrelevant now that it was, as Potter called it, "done".

Except that one.

"The one at St Mungo's," Potter clarifies unnecessarily.

The air shifts. Draco shivers as the cold creeps up his back. Someone must have opened a door.

Not even seven months before, he had another agreement with someone.

Totally different, yet all the same.

And that agreement had been more than that. It had been a vow. A _promise_.

"Why?" he asks hoarsely.

_It's never really going to be over._

Potter doesn't look him in the eye. There is colour on his cheeks, but it's probably only the alcohol. He empties his glass in long swigs. Places it on the table between them gingerly as if it might break.

"I'm going home now, Draco," he says in a clipped tone. "If you really want to know, you will come after me."

He gets up – their knees don't touch when he does – dons his coat and leaves Draco at the table with his half-drunk beer and his question and the raging fire in his belly.

_There is still you._

He decides he really wants to know.

He also decides that it definitely feels more like falling than flying. Like nosediving into an abyss, knowing that the only possible outcome is to be smashed to pieces.

/

The door is open.

Draco enters with long, sure strides, determined to make this different than the last time he was here. That last time, when a new chapter of this long, exhausting narration had started. Which they had agreed to close after the trial, once and for all, so Draco might piece his life and his dignity back together.

Yet now it is after the trail and Potter had changed his mind.

"Potter!" he calls down the hallway, unsure and unwilling to go either way, to the living room or the kitchen.

When he receives no answer, he chooses left and goes to the kitchen.

Potter is sitting at the table. He looks up at him with an unfathomable gaze.

"Why?" he asks again, as if they were still at the Leaky Cauldron, but Potter merely gestures at the chair opposite from him and says, "Sit. Please."

He huffs, considers refusing him. Potter returns his look with steel in his eyes.

In the end, he sits. Gingerly, ready to jump back up again any second.

They look at each other for several moments. From the clock on the wall, seconds tick by.

"I'm in a mess," Potter begins, but then doesn't continue. He just presses his lips together and takes his glasses off to rub his eyes. When he puts the glasses back on, his eyes look red-rimmed and bloodshot.

"You promised," Draco reminds him and rephrases, "We agreed that obliviating you eventually would be the way to bring this ordeal to an end. To right the- the wrongs that have been done to me." It feels awkward to talk like this. Like a victim. He doesn't want to be a victim. "It is what you wanted, and it certainly is what I want." _I want to go back to normal_, he almost says, but cannot. "I want closure."

"I know I did," Potter agrees. "I meant it. I meant it before I had them, and for some time after I got them, but... but not any more now."

"Then why?" Draco clenches his fists on the table. "What is different now?"

Potter opens his mouth and for a long time nothing comes out. Draco is about to groan in fury when he silently utters, "It's because now I want to keep them."

The clock ticks away several seconds.

"Why?" Draco demands with narrow eyes.

"I just do." Potter sets his jaw. "Are you scared I'd use them against you?"

"No," he answers haltingly. "No. I just don't understand."

"No, you wouldn't," Potter mumbles. After another moment of hesitation, he pulls his wand and points it at the cupboard. A saucer comes flying into his hand. He puts it down in front of himself, between the two of them, with endless carefulness so that to doesn't even make a sound against the wood.

"Did you know that almost any object containing some lead can function as a pensieve?" Potter now points the wand at his own temple, closes his eyes and pulls out a shimmering silver-white thread as he explains, "There is some lead colour in the ornamentation. It's an old piece from the Black manor".

Like a strand of spider's silk, with his wand's guidance, the first thought floats into the saucer.

"This is from the trial. The bad quality of the case-related parts is due to the Pompeiian."

He pulls out another thread. It seems a lot darker than the one before. "This is from the evening before the trial."

And another. Mottled white. "From the day after the second implantation."

And three more. Bone, gypsum, blinding snow. "From the days after the first implantation."

The threads swirl and writhe hypnotizingly like silvery eels, tangling but never knotting.

"You came here, which means you want to know," Potter says and looks straight at him again. "Have a look, then."

He offers a hand, palm up.

Draco unclenches one of his fists and takes it.

Not a second later, before he can even properly feel the touch, before he can discern if Potter's skin is warm or his own is just cold, Potter plunges into the makeshift pensieve, and the undertow pulls Draco along.

/ **TBC**

_This chapter break was brought to you by Nia :) _

_The idea that interrogation under veritaserum can be influenced originally comes from Duinn Fionn's masterpiece "A Thousand Beautiful Things" in which one Severus Snape instructs his disciple in the art of evasion._ _Head over to skyehawke to read this story which I still consider one of the best pieces of HP fanfiction ever written._


	24. Chapter 23

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Thanks to ChereDaemon for fav'ing/following - both my story and me. I am so flattered!_

_Alright, so. This chapter is the result of one long, wild night of writing. I went a teensy bit, uh, freaky with this.  
_

___And into Harry Potter's pensieve we go!_

/

**-/Chapter 23/-**

/

They travel merely a few metres, to Potter's living room. The other Potter is standing in the doorway, and the other Draco by the window, looking out. The latter turns around as if on an inaudible cue, or as if he had just felt the presence, felt someone watching him.

Draco hardly recognizes himself. The man by the window seems taller, more present than he ever was, more- beautiful. His eyes smoulder with a determination and self-assuredness he hasn't felt in himself in years.

The Potter in the doorway returns that look, then lets his gaze fall a bit. It first halts by the other Draco's mouth, then falls further down to his robe.

He says, "Take it off."

It sounds like it's coming from far away, even though he is standing almost beside the speaker, even though he can see his lips move as they form those words.

He watches his other self reach up slowly with both hands to open the upper button of his robe. Then the second one. The robe splays and bares his throat, the points of his clavicles, the jugulum that tenses as he swallows, the top of his sternum, all creamy white skin-

Suddenly, the picture hiccups as if there were a skip in the tape. Draco by the window still has his back stubbornly to the Potter by the door who clears his throat to call attention to himself. The Draco by the window tenses visibly at the sound.

"Well," Potter rasps. "That was different."

The image crumbles away.

/

They are on the pavement across the street from the entranceway Draco fled into that Wednesday weeks ago. Cars zoom by and the rain keeps falling, shrouding everything in greyish mist. The two people in the shadows across the street are still visible in spite of it all, one brightly blond, the other black-haired.

Draco realizes that they are embracing, that the one's face is buried in the nape of the other's neck in a possessive kiss, oblivious to the world around them, just as everything except Potter next to him melts into smoke.

/

They sit at another table in May's Café, a table over from their identical twins.

From behind the bar, Paul glances at them with a dissatisfied glower.

The other Potter grasps the other Draco's wrist. And then doesn't let go but caresses that tender spot with the pad of his thumb.

Draco sees his own eyes widen and his own lips part for a sigh.

When everything dissolves, the other Draco hasn't yet pulled away.

/

At St Mungo's, room 419. Draco sees himself in the hospital gown, standing by the window to look at the fake outside like he really did.

The other Potter is standing behind him. For a long moment, nothing happens. Then, Potter lifts his hand slowly, as if in a trance. Hesitatingly he reaches out to the bow at the top of the other Draco's neck that holds the papery garment on his otherwise bare body.

Just as his trembling fingers have pulled the lace far enough to make the bow come undone, just as the patient gown is deciding whether to cling to him for another breath or to fall to the floor, the scenery changes again.

/

Another Draco emerges from the pitch black of a tunnel, shuffling into a small, square chamber, windowless and lit only by a spiky candelabra that dangles from a ceiling hidden high up in the shadows.

The other Draco's hands are bound in front of him and folded as if in desperate prayer, his feet shackled together at the ankles. The chains jingle with each tiny step.

The form of another Potter peels itself out of the darkness of the tunnel, but it is as if he were a piece of that darkness, as if he had torn a shred out of it and cloaked himself with it.

He steps into the chamber right after the other Draco, closes the door and bolts it shut twice to lock out the entire world.

When it is done, he lets out a long breath and pulls his cuffs straight. He is wearing an impeccable uniform, all made of dark material, black leather gloves and boots, a truncheon and a coiled whip at his hip on the one side, a riding crop and a heavy-looking key ring on the other. There are medals and badges pinned to his chest, and the silver chain of a fob watch clinks softly against the shiny brass buttons. He looks immaculate, powerful.

Dangerous.

"Draco Malfoy," the other Potter says softly, and the bound Draco straightens and stiffens at the sound and doesn't dare to turn around.

"Do you want to go to Azkaban?" It is almost a whisper, but the black tiled walls reflect each menacing syllable.

"No," the addressed answers with a strangled voice. "I don't want to." His teeth are rattling audibly.

"So if you had the chance to avoid your punishment...?" Potter does not finish the sentence but struts toward his prisoner until they are almost chest to chest. There is a predatory air to Auror Potter in his spotless uniform. His detainee looks mangled and sweaty and helpless in comparison.

The unfinished sentence hangs between them. The other Draco swallows and dares a frantic glance into the jailer's eyes. "What do I do?" he breathes.

Auror Potter smiles mildly and reaches down to open the handcuffs. When they are loosened, the other Draco haltingly lets his arms sink until they hang by his sides. He eyes the Auror in front of him with large, apprehensive eyes.

Potter walks around him, brushing by his shoulder, the cuffs in his hands chinking with every step, in harmony with the keys at his belt and the watch chain across his chest. His leisurely footsteps reverberate through the chamber, all the way up to the unseen ceiling.

He stands behind him, closely enough to smell his hair. Draco sees him leaning in ever so subtly.

The other Potter touches his prisoner's elbows, almost gently coaxes him to put his hands behind his back. He complies reluctantly.

Finally, the handcuffs click again. The sound visibly rattles through the other Draco's body, and he takes a shuddering breath.

Auror Potter walks back around again. On his way, he lifts a glove-covered hand to run a fingertip along the other Draco's jawline.

Draco sees the other Draco's nostrils flare at the touch, sees his chest heave and fall rapidly, and his eyelids flutter shut.

When he reaches his chin, Potter's fingers wander downwards, to his collar, slide under the knot of the tie. He jerks it to loosen it without consideration for the neck it is attached to.

As his body snaps forward, the other Draco cries out in surprise, but his mouth immediately clicks shut again and he straightens back up slowly. There is alarm in his face, as if he were expecting punishment.

Auror Potter merely slips the tie from his neck and lets it fall to the floor.

His right hand proceeds further downward to open the buttons of his prisoner's coat one after the other.

His left comes up to his face. He cups and caresses his cheek.

Draco sees Potter step closer, sees Potter's thumb push into a slightly opened mouth, sees that slick leather invading it, sliding on top of a moist, pink tongue, and the sight makes his own mouth go very dry.

The claustrophobic room begins to dissolve.

/

For the last of Potter's thoughts, they are back at the courtroom. Judge Higgs is there, looking more magpie-esque than ever, and her three helpers, Kennedy and Boothe, and the three others in the audience. He spots himself in his seat, his blond hair almost luminous, brighter than it really is.

The longer he looks, the more threadbare and thin the picture seems to get, as if there were a fog in the room. Although he sees Higg's mouth move, no sound comes out. The scenery hitches like an old VHS tape.

Suddenly, the other Draco gets up – straightens his jacket just like Draco remembers himself doing it once during the trial – and purposefully walks up to the other Potter's desk. The latter gets up from his own seat. He is about to issue a rebuke for the transgressive behaviour as his shirtfront and collar are grasped violently and pulled without a warning.

The kiss is more of a collision. Everything around the kissing couple is swallowed by a white flash. The other Draco yanks at the other Potter's clothes so fiercely that the latter is impelled to move around the table. When finally the obstacle is bypassed, their bodies connect forcefully from knees to chest, as if they were trying to press themselves into one another.

The other Draco pushes against the other Potter, forces him to back up and lean backwards over the table. At the same time, his other hand is clamped around the back of his neck, fingers buried in his black hair.

With one hand Potter searches for support behind him. He hits the stack of papers and the folder and wipes them away. As they tumble from the table and rustle to the floor, Potter lies back, helpless under the onslaught, but humming contentedly all the same with his eyes closed, and Draco can't stop looking at his mouth, at how wide open it is, how it seems to welcome that other tongue as it is thrusting-

"Stop. Stop," he hears. It comes out of his own mouth which is painful from how powerfully he has gritted his teeth.

The white cloud gives way to Potter's kitchen with a silent clap of thunder.

He finds himself sitting there still, bathed in sweat, trembling.

The feeling is the same as the one he has had so often in the morning, but he is not in the privacy of his bed, so everything is different. Everything is bad. He drives the pointy corner of his ring finger's nail into the pad of his thumb and focusses on the pain. Pain driving out the heat.

As Potter's fingers move around in his palm, he remembers that they are still holding hands. Just as he tries to pull away and to get up from his chair, Potter grasps his wrist, as fast as a snake lashing out. His clutch is a hot iron.

"No! No, Draco, please," Potter almost yells at him. There is an unrelenting power in his words, and in his gut Draco knows that the uniformed Potter from that little chamber is lurking right underneath the surface. The idea makes the hairs on his neck bristle. His free hand claws at the edge of the table.

"This is sick," he wants to say, but only the last word comes out, and as a sob.

"No, it is not." The tone warrants no contradiction. His fingers pull tighter still, and pull his hand and his arm further towards him so Draco ends up sitting on the front edge of his chair, his upper body leaning uncomfortably over the table.

"You wanted to know. Now you do." His voice is strict. "And I will only obliviate what you just saw from your mind if you don't take your memories from me."

Draco feels his heart fluttering and clenching agitatedly. Blackmail. Again.

"I know you want to protect your dignity and integrity because these things are precious to you. I understand." He slides his free hand toward the saucer in which his thoughts are still whirling as if nothing has happened and pulls it toward himself, as if to bring it to safety. "I want to protect your... My. _Our_ memories because they have become precious to me."

"They never belonged to you," Draco presses through clenched teeth. "I should never have-"

"If I can't have _you_, at least I will keep _them_!"

Potter inhales and exhales trembling breaths through his nose and looks squarely into his eyes as if to dare him to say something.

/ **TBC**


	25. Chapter 24

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_Whoops, a bit late again! Gah, sorry!_

_Thanks to CaiKa and LaDiE AkEginU o.0.o for following and/or fav'ing my story! And a virtual hug to Collette Nicole for the review! (I'm afraid you're not going to like this chapter's ending any more than the last one's. So sorry. I am just not a nice person.)_

_This one is really goddamn short. My apologies. I couldn't segment it any other way.  
_

/

**-/Chapter 24/-**

/

Draco hardly recognizes him. His expression is so raw.

"_Have_ me?" is all he manages weakly in response.

The desperately irate stranger dissolves in an instant, and Potter lets his hand go. Draco numbly sinks back onto his chair and rubs his sore wrist. All the while he finds he cannot break eye contact.

"I desire you, Draco," Potter says, slowly and clearly enunciating every syllable, stressing the second word so there is no room for doubt. "And I know that you once thought you might desire me as well. But I know that it appals and frightens you. So much so that I can never have you."

Draco knows that he hopes for him to contradict. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he finds himself hoping for the same, but there is a hard knot in his throat.

The distant sound of a car horn reminds him that the front door is still open.

He remains seated.

"This is a side effect from the implantation spell," Draco finally says. He is not sure how the words make it past that knot. "My dreams somehow- festered. It isn't really you."

"You're right," Potter accedes calmly, then tilts his head. "And you're wrong."

"This is all my fault." _I corrupted you and this is my punishment. _

_For me to hear you say those three words._

"Yes," Potter again agrees, and again shakes his head next. "And no."

"Potter, this is-"

"Unnatural?" he prompts, and Draco falls silent so he answers himself. "Yes. No. Perhaps. Who cares?" He shrugs. "Is it really important?"

Before he can answer – a choked 'Yes, it is!' is on his tongue – he continues, "You see, ever since it started, I agonised over this. You, figuratively and literally, put the idea of you and me into my head. It is therefore not my own. It's not my own desire. It is artificial, and therefore it is false."

Potter turns his head to look out of the window. Draco follows his eyes. Raindrops are racing across the pane.

"But isn't-" He licks his lips. "Isn't just- _flirting_ essentially the same?" Potter suddenly asks as if to himself.

Draco isn't sure if he is serious although the idea of him joking in a situation like this is hard to stomach.

"The whole point of making advances to somebody else," Potter continues almost absently, "is to put the idea of a relationship into their mind. If this idea catches or not depends on the person who is being flirted with, but ultimately, one must argue that it wasn't that person's original idea either. It is equally artificial, but we wouldn't call it false because that person was- favourably disposed towards it."

As if coming out of a reverie, Potter looks back at him again.

"I caught your idea, Draco. I had the disposition. So you might have provided the spark, but it is my flame. It is _my_ desire."

A tense moment passes, then breaks when Potter shrugs.

"In the end, I guess it is impossible to know which one is true." He pushes his glasses up on his nose. "Likewise, no one can tell me whether all things are always on the same trajectory anyway. Like, if we hadn't done the spell, maybe I would have felt the same eventually. Or not. If you had taken me up on my offer to find a capable lawyer who would have handled everything for you, maybe I would never have wasted another thought on you and all this for the rest of my life. Or maybe your first few words from our first meeting at the café would have haunted me forever. Like they do now," he adds with a frustrated huff.

_It seems that I desperately want to have sex with you, _Draco remembers himself saying. Although it is only a month ago and although the general condition hasn't changed at all, it already seems like a distant dream.

"Maybe, if you hadn't come to the café that Friday, I would have hunted you down, out of- out of a sense of obligation, or maybe I would have gone to Wales with my colleagues to hunt down Thorfinn Rowle with them instead. Maybe," he breathlessly continues, "maybe if your father had been a slightly better man, I wouldn't have had a reason to turn down your handshake when we were eleven, and I wouldn't have refused the hat when it tried to put me into Slytherin. Who knows, we would've been more like Al and Scorpius. Maybe, maybe, maybe."

Draco can find nothing sensible to say. His head is spinning.

"In the end, all I can possibly know for sure is that I want you. I want you so badly it aches, so please- please believe me. And let me keep the memories. That is all I ask." His breath trembles again. "That is all I know I can ask of you."

It is not possible to stand that look another second.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the frayed strip of shirt fabric Potter had given him at the room 419. With a violent motion, he undoes the knot.

There is no sound or sensation about it this time. His fingernails hurt, that is all. He tosses the rag onto the table carelessly.

He gets up and takes a step toward the door, then turns around as he reaches into his pocket a second time.

With a force that makes the makeshift pensieve saucer jump, he slams the two dice on the table. Potter seems startled and watches him leave, wide-eyed and silent.

/

When he looks back to this moment later, he is not sure why he did what he did. Potter had merely asked him to not obliviate him, to release him from that vow he had made. He is not sure why he didn't stay another moment so Potter could obliviate those six imaginations from him that he can feel quickly spreading through his bloodstream.

Perhaps, he reasons, he needed to show him that there was more that he could have asked of him after all.

/ **TBC**

_Only one more chapter and an epilogue to go. I'm going to post them both (!) tomorrow to make up for the shortness of this one.  
_

_Thank you for reading!  
_


	26. Chapter 25

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_And here we are, folks. This is the last real chapter of this story.  
_

_Many thanks to Sliding Shine and La Argentina for reviews! (Re:La Argentina: Patieeeence :D)_

/

**-/Chapter 25/-**

/

Once upon a time, he had always looked forward to the end of June. He only really got to enjoy it properly three times out of seven, but the anticipation and delight had been intense and true. Going back home, seeing mother and even father again, having a break from all the homework and the annoying schoolmates and all the drag, sleeping in his own bed again, the unsurpassed manor meals... it had been wonderful. It had felt like returning to the place he truly belonged, even though he had never understood it that way as a child.

As if to make up for the four lost years in which a dark lord and a war had robbed him of his pleasure, and the eleven years in which June had passed him by as if it were just another ordinary month, this year's June sees him nervier and more excited than he had ever been in those three Junes of the faraway past combined.

The engine is finally pulling in to the station. Steam billows, the brakes screech deafeningly, valves whistle along with the guard. He tries to resist the temptation of running along the windows to maybe catch a glimpse of his son through the windows. When impatience mounts as countless children pour out of the train, yet not the one child he is waiting for, he starts pacing along the ornamental ledge made of bricks he has positioned himself on to oversee the teeming crowd from multiple angles.

When Scorpius finally jumps down the stairs near the middle of the train he is among the very last passengers. Draco catches sight of his blond hair – which, he immediately notices, hasn't been cut since Christmas and has grown almost down to his shoulders – and can't help sighing in relief and smiling like a fool.

Before Scorpius even looks around the station, he turns around to catch his bags as they are fired from inside and piles them up to his left. Albus Potter's bags follow, and Scorpius heaps them up to his right. Finally, young Potter himself jumps out, marginally more carefully than his friend due to a tiny white owl sleeping on his shoulder.

The Potter-Weasley clan descends on Albus and his luggage without delay. Ginevra Weasley alternately hugs and kisses her two returned boys – James Sirius stands by with what appears to be his girlfriend by his side. Presently, an uncountable number of redheads joins the party and blocks Ginny's fussing from his sight.

Draco sees Potter pulling his eldest into a short, the younger into a much longer embrace – James appears a little disinclined to public displays of paternal affection, especially in the presence of his girlfriend – and clapping Scorpius on the shoulder.

They are just exchanging a few words when Astoria swoops in. She hugs and kisses her son just like a mother should. Draco turns away nonetheless and hates himself for the clenched fists in his pockets.

Last he heard she had moved to Calais permanently. The divorce papers had taken a full twenty-four hours to reach him each time, and even the Ministry clerk who had been assigned to their file had complained about how inconvenient it was that not both parties were within reasonable posting and apparating distance. Draco had tacitly listened to his lamentations and hoped she might move to South Africa or perhaps New Zealand soon. Or to Antarctica, so the climate might match the warmth of her heart-

"Dad!"

Immediately all bad thoughts disperse. He steps down from his little ledge to come his son's way and folds him into his arms like he never has before but suspects he will do more often from here on in. Scorpius hugs him back wordlessly and allows the embrace to go on for several long and wonderful seconds even though people are watching.

"Did you have a good journey?" he asks when he wants to say _Dear Merlin, why did you have to grow up so quickly?_ and "You are certain that you didn't leave anything on the train?" instead of _Dear Mordred, how_ _I missed you_.

Scorpius peels himself out of his arms and looks at him, face gleaming. "Mom said she's going to pick me up when I come back from New York and that I'll stay with her for two weeks and come back to Wiltshire after that, so, can Shrew stay over at our place the weekend after, please, Dad, please? He says his dad has two tickets left over for the championship final and he says that you and I could come, too. It's in August, please can we, Dad? Please?"

He laughs and tousles his hair in response. "We'll see about that, okay?" Involuntarily he thinks back to his sister-in-law saying 'I guess adults tend to generally underestimate kids when it comes to such things'. He had to give it to her, she might have been right that one time. He makes a mental note for the more distant future to ask Scorpius whether he had known that his parents would split up eventually, and already prepares himself to not be surprised by the answer.

"Okay," Scorpius agrees readily – which strikes Draco as uncharacteristically compliant, or maybe his son had just become sly? –, and also agrees when Draco suggests they go pick up his luggage and go home. As they make their way through the rapidly thinning crowd, Scorpius goes, "Dad?"

"Mh?" He turns his attention to him while sidestepping a luggage trolley that appeared out of nowhere.

"There's something I really kind of need to talk to you about." Scorpius sounds oddly serious and nervous.

And suddenly they have arrived at the part of the station that has been unofficially claimed by Grangers, Weasleys and Potters or their immediate affiliates. The former two and the last group have formed their own big cluster, whereas the third stands a bit to the side, in close proximity to Scorpius' own trolley, as if guarding it.

He stops willing his heart to cease its mad racing. He knows that it won't obey.

He feels the green-eyed gaze on himself as pictures and words flash through his mind, things that he once wanted and then never stopped wanting, scary and unthinkable things. Vertiginous things. He had hoped, but they have lost none of their power. If anything, they are now familiar to him and he is more familiar to them and they know him so well. They know all his weak spots, the cracks and chinks in the armour.

They walk past the big crowd – Draco is careful to slip past Granger and Weasley senior unseen or at least without making eye contact – up to the splinter group that only consists of young Albus Severus and his father. With all the noise and chatter around they need to come up close before they are actually in hearing range.

_Because I had made a habit of keeping everything at a distance, suddenly everything was not close enough for comfort. Never close enough for comfort._ He read those sentences in a book once. Maybe it was even the same biography that once yielded the flying-and-falling analogy.

He lifts his face to meet Potter's eyes and knows perfectly well why he is remembering that sentence now. Not close enough, no.

Potter regards him evenly and only says, "Draco." His voice carries over the din.

_The only real difference between flying and falling is the landing, isn't it?_

"Actually," he says and turns his face toward Scorpius who is still by his side, looking anxious about revealing to his father his friendship with the son of a suspected nemesis, "I think there is something _I_ need to talk to _you_ about as well."

_You see, there is this man._

When he looks back up again, Potter smiles a little smile and nods at him.

/ **Fin  
**

_Fear not, there's an epilogue!_


	27. Epilogue

Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires

Author: Aristide Cauquemaire

Pairing: HP/DM

Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama

/

_I also uploaded chapter 25 today. Make sure you read that already!_

_And just for your reading pleasure... The epilogue! There's, uhm. Smut. Shameless smut. You all have my wonderful beta Nia (HP-Lette-Fan) to thank for it; she told me to post it. Here it is.  
_

_Enjoy :)_

/

**-/Epilogue/-**

/

"D'you have the books?"

"Yep."

"Jar?"

"Ye-es."

"What about the-"

"Yeah, yeah. Come on now, or it'll be dark before we're there." Scorpius pulls the zips on his backpack tight a last time and slips it onto his back. "We'll be back before eight, 'kay? Bye!"

Before Draco can get a word in edgeways, his son and Albus Potter are already outside, mounting their brooms and flying east at breakneck speed. He looks after them until they become two tiny specks in the cloudless, brilliant blue sky and disappear behind the crowns of the poplars, then steps back inside the winter garden.

Harry – it's Harry now, in his head, even though he still addresses him by his last name out of habit – looks at him from his seat and sets his teacup down slowly and deliberately.

"Tell me again that they'll be fine?" he entreats him with a mild smile.

"They'll be fine," Draco assures him for the third time. "It's outside the property but the protective spells extend to that place, and Scorpius has known it since he was five. I checked the tree house last week. The faereflies are there, and they're also fine. It's all... perfectly fine." A short pause. "And anyway, they are eleven years old. May I remind you of the things _you_ did when you were eleven years old?"

Harry suppresses a sheepish grin as if to say 'Fair enough'.

Draco doesn't sit back down in his chair, and he doesn't mind his half-drunk tea getting cold as it is standing there, abandoned on the table. Instead he clings to the chair's backrest as if it were the edge of a cliff.

Who knew what might happen if he lost hold? How he would fall and where he might land? Where his feet might carry him?

What he would do once he got there...?

He looks at Harry and holds his gaze for long, silent moments.

It had been forty seven days since they had last met, on the platform 9 ¾ of King's Cross Station. They had barely exchanged a nod and a look when a big throng of fuzzy-haired gingers had separated them messily, and he had retreated somewhat to stay out of Hermione Granger's way, so in the end, he watched Potter's back disappear and reappear in a Muggle crowd and then disappear completely behind a corner.

Forty seven long days of coming to terms with- with how things really are. Days of thoughts drifting and weaving into predictions of the future, into entire scenarios playing in his head as if it were a little stage in there. Nights of evaluations, and of merciless scrutiny, of torment.

And then – eventually, agonisingly slowly – catharsis. Eight days ago during breakfast he spotted Harry's name in a Prophet article and a deep, comfortable warmth settled softly, calmly into his chest.

He figured it out, then.

The talk with Scorpius had been staggeringly easy in comparison. It had ended with. "Okay, dad. Can we buy another TV for my bedroom? I also kind of want an XBox."

At the end of it all had stood a short, ridiculously innocuous-seeming letter to Potter, inviting him and his son rather formally to tea and dinner at the Manor.

Their handshake at the door – at least two seconds longer than would have been appropriate – and the look that had passed between them had made everything clear. Absolutely, finally, clear. Another agreement, but deeper, more of the assurance of him swearing on silver, more of a pledge even than Potter's vowing knot. They had come to an understanding, their respective decisions meshing, clicking like fitting puzzle pieces that weren't meant to ever be separated again.

Harry had nodded at him again. There had been a relieved smile in the corner of his mouth that morphed into something- something more_ wicked_. Before Draco could really see it, it was interrupted by the boys running around and Milly ushering the guests in while at the same time trying her hardest to not overstep her house-elfian bounds, anxious to have them taste the pie she had made for the joyous occasion. _Guests_. At the _manor_. Draco just hoped she wouldn't break out in song.

Their first meeting after all this time had been spent in the dining room and the sitting room, bringing each other up to date about the things that had happened in their lives in the meantime, with Scorpius and Albus occasionally bustling around them as if they were at least five persons instead of just two.

Sitting across from each other with at least seven feet of air between them, they had talked about their respective divorces. Formalities that were long overdue for each of them, and which were nothing but an egregious waste of time and energy in hindsight.

Coincidentally, both of their final ratification papers had been notarised on the exact same day. Harry had joked about it, saying that the people in Administration and Certificates – he called it 'A and C' and told amusing anecdotes about a German guy called Ingo who apparently was the biggest dud in the entire department – wouldn't be able to put two and two together if someone handed them an abacus.

They had talked about how Draco was planning to officially make Magnus managing partner of his potion shop in September, and how Harry was thinking about getting Durmstrang's DADA prodigy Yaroslav Mikhail Shostakovsky into the Auror program as soon as he graduated in order to get him away from residual dark influences on the continent. They had talked about their plans for the Hogwarts hols, those of the past and of the future, about the daring endeavour of coordinating children, ex-wives, friends and work. They had talked about politics, the papers, and tea, and even the weather.

It had been good and easy conversation. Harry was staggeringly easy to talk to, and to listen to. Draco found himself admiring the cadences and the deepness of his voice, and the way he always, very subtly, engaged him into the conversation. He seemed so effortless, and he made Draco feel effortless.

But they had now talked enough and they both knew it. They had known it from the moment they had clasped hands at the threshold that words alone wouldn't last them the whole evening.

The entire, huge house is empty except for themselves. They are alone together. For the next four, five, maybe even six hours.

"Milly!" Potter suddenly calls into the thin air, as if to debunk his unspoken thoughts.

The house-elf appears with a 'pop' and bows deeply. "Milly is here, Harry Potter, sir." Milly had once come through the Hogwarts kitchen, where the Story of Harry Potter, Valiant Hero and Patron Saint of House-Elfs had long since become its own gospel.

"Say, do you sense Scorpius Malfoy and his guest on the premise, Milly?" he questions the elf, but his eyes are on Draco.

"Milly is sensing the young Master and his guest, the young Mr Potter, yes, yes," comes the enthusiastic answer.

"And they are moving away from the house, yes?"

"The young Master Scorpius and the young Mr Potter is moving quickly toward the east, Harry Potter, yes, sir," Milly says with bright eyes, happy to confirm.

"So, Milly," he says and glances down at the odd creature, "If they were to come back, you could sense that as well, correct?"

Her ears droop a little. "But now they isn't coming back, Harry Potter, sir-"

"I know. But once they do, in a few hours, you would be able to tell, yes? You will sense them when they come back."

"Milly is knowing all the time where the young masters is, as long as they is on the Malfoy family estate," she informs him by the way of an affirmative answer, visibly unsure about hypotheses in general.

Before she can become completely confounded by the thought experiment, Harry turns to her completely and smiles. "Milly, when my son and Master Draco's son are coming back from their trip outside, could you let me and Master Draco know?"

Without waiting for an answer from her, he gets up and walks over to Draco. He looks him in the eye and wordlessly prises his fingers loose from the chair's backrest. He takes his hand firmly into his own.

"Master Draco and I will be upstairs in bed together," he says and looks Draco in the eye all the while, to see those last three words hit and sink in. "Just knock on the door when they are coming back. Can you do that?"

Milly answers in the affirmative once more as Harry pulls Draco across the winter garden, through the hall and up the stairs.

His palm is feverish and sweaty. His grip is unyielding. Draco hurries after him, dizzy and breathless and almost queasy. Everything is suddenly happening so fast.

Harry knows his way around the manor even though he has never been in this part of it personally. Still, he has many memories of it, of things that never happened in these corridors and the rooms, dreams featuring himself.

Dreams he is planning to make reality. Starting now.

Draco almost runs into him when they have arrived in his bedroom and Potter stops abruptly.

Harry lets his hand go and turns around towards him, closer than he ever was. He leans in and Draco mirrors his movement until their foreheads touch, then their noses, their puffs of breath stroking the other one's skin.

Someone once told him that kissing was much like riding a bike. Once learnt, you could never unlearn it again.

For a panicked moment Draco is aware that he has never properly learnt how to kiss at all. There had been no one to teach him. And the last time was an eternity ago.

And he has never kissed a man before anyway – surely it had to be somewhat different from kissing a woman?

To make matters more complicated yet, it had to be one thing to kiss a woman you don't love, and quite another to kiss a man you-

That moment of anxiety bursts like a soap bubble at the most tentative contact of warm lips against his.

That's all their first real kiss is, in the end. It lasts two fluttering heartbeats and is so delicate that he almost isn't sure it actually happened when it is over.

When he opens his eyes again – he hadn't even noticed that he closed them – he sees Harry struggling to get his glasses off.

"These are really in the way," he hears him grumble as he disposes of them by throwing them carelessly onto the nearby desk.

When Harry turns back to him, his face is oddly naked, but also seems more angular and leaner. His eyes are unguarded. He blinks more often.

And he waits, wordlessly demanding that he come and approach this time.

He doesn't have to wait for very long.

Draco clumsily lifts both hands to cup his face – to hold it still, more than anything, because it is easier to hit an unmoving target, he reasons – and presses his mouth onto Harry's lips, wishing that Harry might understand him regardless of the ineptitude, understand the urgency and that an earthquake is currently residing inside his body, hoping that he might comprehend that every single hair on his skin is standing on end just because of him, that he is already slick with sweat from head to toe underneath his clothes and panting even though it's _only just beginning_, and that that last thought is almost making him quail.

A small noise rises from Harry's chest and puffs out of his nose along with a hot breath.

All of a sudden, it is Draco who understands. When he opens his eyes and pulls back, he sees Harry with reddening lips that open for a long, shuddering breath and his eyes screwed shut, leaning in to the touch of his hands.

Harry's hands reach for him. He touches his elbow and his waist. Even through the clothes he can feel the warmth of them.

The third kiss – Draco tries to make a mental note to keep count, possibly for later references, or to keep track of his learning progress – lasts all the way from the middle of the room to the edge of the bed. He isn't sure who had set off their joint motion. They might as well have been walking on the clouds.

Kissing Harry, it turns out, is just as easy as talking to him, if not easier. His lips are firm yet soft and happen to have the perfect shape and size for a kiss, and he doesn't seem to mind that their noses bump against each other sometimes. He smells of the spiced tea they abandoned in the winter garden.

Harry breaks the kiss and flops down on the bed, slips out of his shoes and lies back slowly, an eye on Draco.

Draco hurriedly takes off his vest, and then his own shoes, almost tearing a nail, breaking a digit and falling over in the process, and lies right next to him so they are both on their backs, shoulder to shoulder, looking up at the ceiling.

Their fingers interweave between them when their hands touch, as if they naturally belong interwoven. Draco can feel his own heartbeat hammering away in his throat.

An awkward moment of silence passes and is broken by a low chuckle from Harry.

"Actually, it would have been nicer if you had just..." Harry props himself up on one elbow and leans forward with a mumbled "Ah, never mind", craning his neck to make their mouths meet again. Draco can feel how his lips curve in a smile on his.

After a time, Draco stops counting. There is no way, he discovers, to say if it is all one long, lasting kiss or many small ones. Their lips sometimes part – like when one of them angles his head differently – but then come together again immediately, and it _feels_ like one kiss even though, technically, it would probably have to count as two, and Draco cannot keep track. Every time the contact stops and then is resumed with determination, with renewed and increasing urgency, sparks travel all over his body.

And also, when their lips part and Harry's tongue touches his, all thoughts become jelly, jelly that heats up until it is liquid magma. When he starts pushing that hot, hard tongue deeper into his mouth and grasps his neck with his free hand to pull him even deeper into that devouring kiss – or maybe those devouring kisses, plural – every inch of him starts to tingle as the sparks singe his skin gently.

They both sigh, as if they were relieved of a heavy burden, when Harry slides onto him almost hesitatingly. With a start, Draco realizes that he has a bulge to match his own, and that his every movement, those slow, almost imperceptible thrusts, the canting of his hip, is aimed at generating friction _there_. Draco lifts his hand and lets it slide downwards along the body on top of him. He can feel the muscles contracting as that movement becomes needier, along with the expansion and contraction of his ribcage that is getting more rapid as his breathing speeds up.

Without much thinking, he pulls up one knee, just a fraction, for some support, and moves his hip to keep Harry from slipping off of him.

Their kiss breaks abruptly as Harry pulls away with a gasp.

For a split second, Draco freezes, terrified. Ideas of hurting him or messing up and scaring him away flash through his mind with the speed of light. Already his lips feel cold, his mouth strangely exposed now that it isn't covered any more, empty and hollow as it lacks that deliciously rough tongue that had invaded it.

Instead of running, Harry lowers himself completely onto him, buries his face into the nape of his neck and breathes a "God, please, do that again" onto his skin.

His toes curl. Those five words make his trousers feel a lot tighter.

He does it again, exactly like that. Harry utters a little keening noise and a hissed 'yes' and shamelessly rocks his hips against his thigh and his pelvis.

That noise, just like the words, goes straight to his middle to fan the flames. He repeats the motion to hear it again. And again. And again.

Caught in the slick heat of it all, Draco dares to reach out, slide his palms down his back and grab Harry's buttocks firmly as they bob up and down more and more frantically. Even though the thick material of Harry's trousers he can feel the muscles working forcefully, clenching and unclenching, and he digs his fingers in as hard as he can, fascinated by both the feeling and the sight offered to him. Harry gives a strangled, quivering moan at the contact, half an octave higher than his normal voice. His hot breath grazes Draco's skin.

The powerful undulations become more of an erratic twitch, and Harry throws his head back and gasps again – a strange, gurgling sound this time, followed by a hoarse 'Don't stop. Draco, don't stop' – and finally groans, shudders and collapses onto him entirely with a mighty sigh, as if all his bones had become rubber all at once.

Draco feels the blood hot in his cheeks when he actually understands what has just happened. From inside Harry's ribcage, Harry's heart drums against him mightily, like someone pounding at the door, demanding to be let in. Meanwhile, Draco's heart is pounding right back.

Slowly, he pulls his hands away from where they are and lets them wander upwards again slowly, across the small of Harry's back where his shirt definitely feels clammier than before with sweat, up to his shoulder blades. There they come to rest. He also lets his leg sink back onto the mattress very slowly and carefully. His abdomen and thigh are warm with all the friction.

"It's been a really... really long time," Harry murmurs defensively into his shoulder and Draco can't help a chuckle. He discovers that it is hard to chuckle with a grown man who is breathing heavily lying on one's stomach.

"I kind of... imagined this with the roles reversed." Harry lifts his head to speak into his ear than into the mattress, but lets it sink again groggily.

"I am taller than you, so it is just natural that _you_ would lie on _me_," Draco responds, addressing the mop of hair he can see out of the corner of his eye. Merlin, it feels good to cling to his back like this. To have someone covering him like a blanket. He hasn't felt this for- He has never felt this at all. He looks up to the ceiling and drinks the moment in.

Harry snorts. "Please. You're half an inch taller, maybe. On Tuesdays." His lips skim the crook of Draco's neck and Draco inconspicuously turns his head to expose it, to provide him with more of a target, to give him a subtle invitation to maybe kiss. Or lick. Or bite.

"Just you wait, tall man," he murmurs into his ear, coldly disregarding the plea for attention. "I'll have you on top of me next time."

Draco bites his lip and manages to keep the sigh inside, but his pelvis jerks as if of its own volition, searching for something – anything – to rub against so he might assuage the boiling heat.

Harry slides half off of him with a theatrical grunt, giving him room to breathe but also exposing him to the chill. Draco almost hauls him back but only circles him with his arms instead.

"You know I've been thinking," Harry rasps so lazily that is almost sounds like a purr and nuzzles his neck again as he drapes a leg and an arm over him. "About you and me owing each other favours."

He trails off as his hand trails downward.

Draco feebly wishes that the knock on the door will still be a long, long time coming, and then all coherent thoughts scatter as they fly away.

/

/ **FinFin  
**

_Does this still fall under M-rated anyway? Oh well. _

_This is the actual end of this story. Thank you so much for reading, all of you! _

_Be a dear and write me a comment, that would make me happy._


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